


Worthy

by justanotheranonymouswriter



Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-09-11
Packaged: 2021-02-23 10:42:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 13
Words: 65,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23910283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanotheranonymouswriter/pseuds/justanotheranonymouswriter
Summary: Harvey makes it to the elevator in time and jumps on the prison grenade instead of Mike. S5 Canon Divergence. Angst with a heavy dose of more angst. This began as a one-shot and is now officially a multi-chapter, so let's see how this goes. Some chapters M.Now completed.
Relationships: Donna Paulsen & Harvey Specter, Donna Paulsen/Harvey Specter
Comments: 80
Kudos: 88





	1. 1

**Author's Note:**

> With thanks to vfl_sarah, who generously donated to Australian bushfire relief and asked for 'lots of angst'. Thanks to Sarah for her donation and also for allowing me to share this all with you! This is such a generous fandom and I'm so grateful to be a part of it.

"Donna..."

"Don't do it. Don't fall on your sword again."

He looks at her from beneath hooded eyes, leaning on her chair for way more support than he feels like he should need, but he's exhausted and shot through from stress and his legs suddenly aren't working properly. He hates it as much as he loves it; how easily she pierces through to the core of him, knows exactly what he's thinking. Donna is his compass. She reflects him back to himself better than anyone else, and he knows it's slowly making him the man he wants to be but it's hard to stare at yourself in the mirror all day long and see the cracks under the surface. She knows how to grab onto his conscious and shake it awake, but it's always been to pull him away from his demons and back toward the sunlight and now she's trying to hold him back from throwing himself into the sun and burning up in it altogether.

Harvey knows his own demons and how they make him swing wildly between selfishness and sacrifice, and he feels the weight of every decision, every lie, every sidestep he's made in the last five years. He's not sure if protecting Mike has made him a better person or just a better liar. He loves Mike, but he'd been playing a dangerous game for years now and the thought _was it worth it_ creeps in despite himself. Mike lied too, he knows. Mike convinced him and squared his shoulders and walked through the elevator doors every day with the confidence of a man who had earned a piece of paper he hadn't.

It was Mike. A lot of it was Mike.

But it was also him. He put Donna and Jessica and Louis at risk. He knew who Mike was immediately, knew he was a fraud, knew what bringing him into the firm and into his family could do, would inevitably do, one day. He knew he was flirting with disaster and pulling everyone towards the void with him. But there's a high in the risk that he loves, makes life like _this_ instead of like this. Harvey likes to play in the grey, and pulling Mike alongside him drenched his world in shadow, even if he had to ignore the shade it cast over everyone else around him in the process.

And here Donna is trying to drag him away from the dark without letting him throw himself into the sun and it's hard because he has the weight of the world on his shoulders but the weight of her heart in his chest.

He can't do it, can't think clearly, can't choose between the shadow and the sun and he can't see the needle thread between the two. He pushes away, turns to leave.

And she follows him. She always follows him.

"Show him you have faith in him, like I have faith in you," she says as he stands in her doorway, and she's asking him not to do the thing she can see he's planning, she can see it in his eyes. She's asking him to remember Jessica, remember Louis, remember... her. Remember her and all that she is, wrapped up in his last 13 years and as inextricable as oxygen.

He remembers.

He remembers vanilla in his coffee and late night whiskies chased with shitty thai food and it being her turn to choose the music. He remembers her taking sips of her drink at 2am, stocking feet on the carpet, hips swaying unconsciously while she reads paperwork with her free hand, the nighttime bars of whatever record she's picked distracting her and the dancing distracting him. He remembers jokes and flirting and giggling (with other people he laughs but with Donna he giggles). He remembers moments where he'd fucked up and she'd arrested him with a stare of pure righteousness, and she could kick his conscience into overdrive with that look. He remembers moments where the knot in his stomach, the low and constant desire for her, would make itself known with a suddenness and an intensity that almost took him to his knees, and maybe the same thing happened for her at the same time and they would share a look under hooded eyes that promised everything and nothing all at once.

She's asking him to remember 13 years. To remember every word and joke and glance and touch.

She's asking him to stay.

—

He doesn't listen to her.

—

He meant to, he meant to listen to her, because she's always right and always knows what he should do, and so he went down to the courthouse to sit with Mike and show that he had faith in him, in the work they'd done and in the words they'd used. But then he saw Rachel, and when he asked where Mike was she said 'I don't know', and it hits him all at once who Mike is and _of course he's not here you fucking moron_ and he ran.

He pushes out the door, down the street, past the people on the street and can usually run a lot faster but his heart is hammering against his chest and he can't get his breathing under control.

The elevator doors are closing, and he thinks he's going to miss it, but then he gets his arm through the doors, shoulders them back open.

The elevator takes too goddamn long and his hands twitch at his sides and he tries not to think of her staring at him and begging him not to. He tries not to think about how she isn't here to stop him, and he'd been so obvious last night and how could she have missed that and not be here to stop him. He thinks that's probably easier, because if she stepped in front of him right now, all strength and faith and patience, and asked him to run, he'd go and he'd never look back. He thinks maybe it's not that she missed the look on his face. Maybe she saw it and pretended she didn't, because they lie to themselves about each other all the time and maybe she just didn't have it in her to watch him throw himself into the sun.

The elevator doors click open and he pushes past them, looks up and sees Mike down the hallway, bolting out from the stairwell, and they lock eyes, and they've known each other long enough to know that they're both racing to throw themselves on the same grenade. Mike's eyes go wide, because Harvey is closest to Gibbs' door, so Harvey guesses that must make it fate. Mike opens his mouth, yells 'Harvey', but Harvey's already got his hand on the door and there's no time for negotiation with Mike or Gibbs so Harvey just pushes it open and says "I did it," and Gibbs looks up from her desk at the same time that Mike lands his hand on Harvey's shoulder but he's too late and it's done.

—

He's been left. He's not sure how long; Gibbs has been watching too many procedural cop dramas and has taken the clock out of the room like she's in fucking NCIS, left his cuffs on even, just to provide a constant reminder to him about who's really in charge, and he opens and closes his fists behind him to try and keep the blood flowing.

Mike had protested in Gibbs' office, had railed at Gibbs and Harvey, had done his best to take a bullet that Harvey had already jumped in front of. The problem was that Gibbs wanted Harvey, not Mike - it had always been about Harvey, Gibbs had always been going through Mike to get to him, and Harvey knew it and he wasn't interested in getting up off the train tracks. Harvey pulled Mike's arm towards him, saying 'stop it, Mike, there's no point', and Mike yelling at Gibbs turned into Mike yelling at Harvey, and eventually Mike and Harvey nearly came to blows and then Harvey found himself shoving Mike, found himself yanked backwards a second later, arms pulled behind his back and he only dimly heard the click of handcuffs as the security guard locked his wrists together.

He protested when they dragged him backwards out of Gibbs' office, Mike's demands to Gibbs ringing in his ears. He protested when they pulled him into the interrogation room, protested when dropped him into the chair and again when it became clear they were going to leave him handcuffed in his seat by himself to sweat it out.

It took what felt like hours before Gibbs had come by to gloat and lean on him and try and get him to rat Jessica out and he hadn't answered so Gibbs wondered out loud if he'd like to spend the night in a cell by himself, and Harvey had rolled his eyes at the absurdity of it all, snapping 'for fucks sake I'm not Keyser Soze'.

She'd asked him who Keyser Soze was and he couldn't figure out if she genuinely didn't know or if she was quoting his own reference back to him and that was about right for Gibbs. She's a fucking shifty snake in the grass and he struggles to read her even though reading people is what he does. Maybe he couldn't read her because she wasn't really human, he thought darkly.

He's well versed in the various tricks prosecutors use to make their targets panic, so he keeps the tightness in his chest from becoming a racing mind and heartbeat, stops his brain finding ways to bargain and stops his mouth calling out that he wants to talk to his lawyer. But only just.

He's in the middle of cursing the day he met Gibbs when hears the door click, and he looks up with an insult on his tongue, some callous joke to mask his worry and his guilt, and he knows it won't help but finding a creative way to tell Gibbs to fuck off will make him feel better for a couple of seconds at least.

He sees who it is, and his words die in the back of his throat.

She stares at him as the door closes behind her, then says, "Harvey, you fucking _idiot_."

"Donna."

"Harvey." She's furious, terrified, repeats his name like she thinks he might evaporate from the earth if she doesn't speak him into being. "What did you do?"

She sits down in the chair opposite him but it's more like she collapses into it. She drops her handbag in front of her and she's shaking with adrenaline and rage and fear and her hands twitch like she doesn't know what to do with them, like she wants to reach out to him, to hug him or potentially hit him, but his hands are locked behind him and so she holds herself back. She tries to slump back in her seat but there must be something that pulls at her in the same way it pulls at him and they lean across the table towards each other.

And she repeats, "what did you do?"

He probably has that slack look on his face that he gets when he doesn't want to talk about it. "You know what I did."

"Can't you make a deal?"

He shakes his head. "I said it was me. Just me. You, Louis, Jessica - you're in the clear. Gibbs wants me, not Mike, and she knows she doesn't have a case against Jessica. There's no deal to make." He sighs, resigned. He can't think of anything else to say.

 _Jesus. What a fucking nightmare_.

She doesn't look relieved to be off the hook. "What happens now? Will there be a trial?"

He tries to shrug; it doesn't really come across with his shoulders pulled back behind him. "I already admitted guilt. Gibbs will get me to plead, they'll deliberate with a judge and reach a sentence. No trial."

"Can you negotiate?"

"I already did. Gibbs gets me and in return she can't come after any of you or the firm."

"I meant negotiate to get you off, Harvey." Her breath catches on his name. She's trying hard to be calm and she's vibrating with the effort of it.

"The only way I get out of this is if I turn you all in. I'm not going to do that."

"That's not your choice."

He finally looks her in the eye, and it's the look he gives her when she's trying to sacrifice herself to save him and he won't let her. He wishes he hadn't had to look at her that way so many times through the years. Donna was constantly hurling herself into the breach for him, sheltering him from the worst of the fallout from all his shitty choices and impulsive decisions.

"You don't want to do this," he says.

"I do." Donna is losing the battle for her composure, and it shows in her voice, she's almost shouting now and there's a hoarseness that he only ever hears when she's at the end of herself. "You don't get to make this decision for me, Harvey. That's not fair. I'm in this as much as you are."

"No you aren't." His voice is raising in line with hers. "And you can't, Donna. They'll ruin you, because you know the whole story. If they get you, they get Jessica. And if they get Jessica, they get everyone."

He pushes closer to her. He needs her to see that this is it, this is the only way, he can't let anything happen to her. "It would topple the firm, Donna. Even if you don't go to prison, you'd be blacklisted from stepping foot in a law firm again. And besides all that, they know you and me are..." He doesn't have the words for what they are, so he doesn't try. "If you let them come after you they will _break_ you. And if they break you they'll get what they need to put me away for even longer than they can now, and tear everything else down as well."

The steam goes out of his voice, and he sits back against his elbows, sighs. "You can't, Donna. I'm sorry, but you can't. This is over. It's done. This is how it has to be."

Her eyes go wide, and he can see the reality of what he's done settling in. Donna isn't someone who lives in denial, exactly, but she has a faith in him that borders on the religious, and she walks through life with the unwavering certainty that there's nothing he can't fix. Watching him resigned, surrendered, backed up in a corner he's willingly run into - it doesn't compute for her. She would have walked in here expecting an idea, expecting a scheme, expecting Harvey to tell her not to worry and that he had a plan and that he needed her to go pull some shady shit and find a file or charm someone from some law enforcement office somewhere. But he doesn't, and he sees her body cave in on itself just a little as reality clicks into place for her.

He's going away.

"How long?" she asks.

He shakes his head to the side; it's the face he makes when he doesn't want to answer her, and she sees it, says "Harvey. How long."

A pause. "7 years."

"Fuck, Harvey!"

He looks down at the desk. He can't seem to meet her gaze. "It'll be okay."

"You liar. How could you _do_ this?"

"I had to." He doesn't know how to tell her about the instinct driving him to prove to her that deep down he is who she believes him to be. He doesn't know why it forces him to make decisions that hurt her. False confidence and platitudes always come far easier than honesty, so he says, "Donna, it's going to work out."

"No, it won't." She's up out of the chair, cutting through his bullshit, bearing down on him, and her hands tremble. "Harvey, I've worked for you for 13 years. I've been your friend for 13 years. What do I do? How am I meant to -" she cuts herself off because the only possible endings to that sentence finish with _I love you_ or _I can't do this without you_ and neither of those are things they say to each other.

He wants to comfort her, wants to minimise the gravity of what he's done, and he opens his mouth but all his words about leniency and first time offences and good behaviour get lost when he meets her eyes with his and he can see the same crack in her that's opening up inside his chest and he realises it's not just her losing him, it's him losing her and everything, everything they have and share is teetering on a cliff edge because of him. He's thrown himself into the sun and he's burning her up in the process, and all their _maybes_ and _one days_ and _if I ever pull my shit togethers_ along with it and _holy shit what have I done_ and how could he have chosen Mike over her. He stares at her and she stares at him and his mind goes blank, and he can't find any words to make it better, can't even say sorry, because what the fuck would be the point.

He tries anyway, pushes his chair back with his legs so he can stand, meet her gaze, but he only gets out 'Donna,' before she's around his side of the table, knelt in front of him, her hands on his knees, her eyes locked on his and it's like gravity itself has yanked them together. She opens her mouth to say something, and she searches for words but none come, and if it wasn't here and now he'd probably have found it amusing that she can't figure out what to say, but none of this is funny, it's terrifying and precarious and it's fucking cruel that it feels like Donna might be about to tear down the wall that they've built carefully between them just in time for Gibbs to slap another four up around him anyway.

Donna can't find anything to say, and finally just presses her forehead against his and he squeezes his eyes shut because this is not how he imagined touching his face to hers would happen and it's fucking unfair. He feels her hands come up and cup his jaw, her fingers curling into the hair at the base of his skull, he feels her eyes shut against his, feels her fighting her instinct for him, fighting the urge to raise her voice against the injustice of it all, to rage and fight, and he can feel the tremor through her body that mixes fury and fear for him.

He leans against her and he wouldn't admit it out loud but she's so much stronger than him and it's the only thing that stops his stomach hollowing out.

"You're an asshole," she says, but it sounds like _I love you._

He nods against her forehead and he sighs to release his lungs because his breathing is coming hard, it's catching behind a knot forming in his chest and rattling past his vocal chords. "I know."

"I wish you were a worse person."

"I know."

He swallows.

"I wish you didn't think I was a good man."

"I know."

He wants to grab her hand, flexes his fingers with the instinct, and she must have read it in the way his shoulder twitches because she slides her hand around his waist and grips his fingers loosely, slides her other arm around his shoulders, and he pushes his face into the side of her neck and she smells like her. Harvey isn't sure how a quiet minute of peace has managed to invade this goddamn disaster of a situation he's created for them both but he's not complaining, and he's not fine, she's not fine, but they can almost believe it for a minute.

"It's going to be okay," he says again, and they almost believe that too.


	2. 2

He should have finished up his work an hour ago, but he couldn't seem to concentrate properly anymore. He'd drifted off again, only a few words further into whatever email he was working on, fingers resting on his keyboard as he stared at nothing in particular.

He's not one for day dreaming, and he's not really daydreaming now. Daydreaming, when he does do it, is for thinking about things he wants to imagine, not things he doesn't. And so he's not imagining as much as he is counting. He's not many hours away from walking through gates he doesn't have keys for, not many hours away from trading his suit in for prison blues, from his last glass of whisky. He's ticking hours off in his head and he knows he shouldn't be hiding in his office tidying up paperwork and finalising handovers. He shouldn't be lying to himself that this was what people wanted from him right now. Louis and Jessica didn't need updates on his cases, they didn't need a formal letter of resignation and they didn't need him to change the auto response attached to his email address. They needed him there, spending time, solidifying friendship with drinks and laughter, through touch and tears, shoring up the relationships they all knew were going to come under heavy artillery for the next several years. He should have been seeking them out, telling them how much they all meant, making promises he might not be able to keep, telling stories and remembering all the things they were to each other.

He couldn't. He was trying to earn all they'd done for him.

Not just the last six years and back further - and not just for the support they'd given him as he'd stood in the dock while Gibbs and the judge looked at him like he was scum, like he was a fraud and nothing else. Jessica had stood next to him, primary counsel, working day and night to mitigate the worst of the damage from his guilty plea. Mike as well, he had stood beside him like the'd always been brothers, twisting his case and the law around his finger to squeeze every drop of doubt and leniency he could out of obscure statutes nobody else could remember reading about in law school. Louis had been a fierce and loyal companion, digging up Gibbs' entire life, trading out any sniff of impropriety to get her to back off the most punishing of her impulses.

At the end of it, they'd fought and clawed and scratched until his sentence came down from seven years to two. He still had to surrender his licence to practise, effective the moment he walked through the gates of Danbury. He still had to rebuild from scratch afterwards. But he would have five more years to rebuild than he thought he would. And that wasn't bad. Two years he could do. Two years he could handle.

He could do two years.

They'd got him back five years of his life, and before that, given him a family, and a home, and a refuge. They'd made him a better person, a better lawyer, a better friend. They'd piled chance upon chance for him, and when he'd squandered all that to drag them and the firm through the mud, they'd still stood by him. They deserved all of him.

So he'd sat in his office, and then in his house, writing letters and making phone calls and organising everything he could think of. Harvey wasn't going to walk into Jessica's office, rattle off a speech about how much she meant to him, cry and hug her. He wasn't going to mope and reminisce and get lost in nostalgia. He didn't have a lot of time, and he couldn't save the firm and also spend his last few days of freedom wandering into different offices declaring his love for everyone around him. He couldn't make a gesture big enough to balance out all they'd done for him and he couldn't undo the last six years.

But he could do this. He could try to make sure the firm would survive on past him, that the only casualty from his long running deception was him.

Mostly only him, at least.

There's a quiet knock, and Harvey looks up, and Donna is standing in the doorway. She's wearing the same expression she's worn since he'd met her outside the prosecutor's office after his release, through the sleepless nights working on his case, through his sentencing and through the call to his phone for the final outcome, and the quiet hour after that when they'd stood, not talking, in his office, after two years was confirmed and they both tried to decide if they were happy it wasn't seven or devastated that it was more than nothing. She's equally full of fear and full of faith and she's somehow wearing them both on her face.

"Hey," he says. "What are you still doing here? It's late. Go home."

"I could say the same to you."

He tries a smile. "Well, you're not going to prison in three days, so I think you can afford to get some sleep." But he knows his smile doesn't reach his eyes, and it doesn't reach hers either. He holds her eyes for a moment, and then says, "I just need to get a few more things done. I won't be much longer." He's lying, but he doesn't want to admit to Donna that he's not planning on going home tonight; she'll just fuss and argue and he has so much to do before he can be certain that he can walk away from a firm that isn't about to collapse under the weight of his sin.

"Oh, you won't be too much longer?" she repeats, her eyebrows raised in the way she does when he's managed to sneak exactly nothing by her. She enters his office, sits down on his couch, and starts thumbing her way through a magazine.

"What are you doing?" he asks.

She leans over to his drinks tray, pours herself a whisky. "Well, since you're only going to be a few minutes longer, I figured I would keep you company and make sure you get home okay." She sips from her glass and sits back into the couch without breaking eye contact with him and she may as well have a neon sign over her head announcing how little of his bullshit she's buying.

He sighs. "Okay, you caught me. But I have to get through this all. I can't go without knowing I've set the firm up to survive for the next couple of years. I need to do this."

"You don't."

"I do." He stands, dropping a stack of paper on his desk as he walks around to face her. He perches on the corner of his desk. "I have the Mercer acquisition that's on shaky ground, and virtually every one of my clients is looking to jump ship so I have to get them all locked in, get them settled with other lawyers, kiss a whole bunch of ass, and even then I'm not sure how Jessica's going to deal with the bad PR around this, so I probably need to draft a press release…" he trails off and scrubs a hand over his face. He needs a break before his to-do list cripples him with its sheer size, he knows. But down time is a luxury he doesn't have right now.

The irony is that in a few days, he won't be able to do this ever again, and down time is the only thing he'll have too much of, and it isn't lost on him.

"Come on." She stands, walks towards him, and she's got the same smile on her face that she's always had since he met her - knowing, compassionate, and calling him on his bullshit. "Let's go get a drink."

"I can't, Donna. I have too much to do." He drops his head and stares at the ground, avoiding her eyes; he can feel the frailty in his excuse and he can't summon a poker face good enough to sell it.

"There'll always be more paperwork, Harvey." He can hear the unspoken _there won't always be time for us to drink and laugh and talk_ , but he doesn't know what to do with it; he's edgy and exhausted and so goddamn weary, and there is a deep grief on the horizon that he knows is waiting for prison bars to drop to arrive fully, but it's coming for him all the same.

His hands are loose at his sides and he feels her slide her fingers underneath his palms, gripping loosely as she rubs her thumb over his knuckle. "Harvey." She tugs on his hands lightly, pulling him to his feet, trying to get him to look at her. "I know Jessica and Louis and Mike appreciate everything you're doing to try and help before…before. But I miss you." Harvey immediately looks down at his shoes again; she's always known how to make him fucking uncomfortable, hurling her vulnerability out to him like there was no way he could ever mistreat it. It doesn't matter that he's mistreated it with a regularity that borders on depressing. She trusts him. He loves that she trusts him, but it's also the most gut wrenching awfulness that she does because of how little he deserves it. He and Donna aren't... whatever they almost are. But they are _something_ , and he can't shake the haunted certainty that he's made a decision that has fundamentally uprooted her life alongside his.

But she doesn't let him off the hook and ducks her head to catch his gaze, holds her eyes with his. "Hey. I miss you. I only have a few days left with you. I don't want to lose you to paperwork and emails and phone calls before I have to lose you to prison."

She's right, he knows she's right, but he can't quite bring himself to admit it. The walls and compartments he's built up around his emotions for years don't come down just because he's not so sure he wants them any more.

But her hands are strong, and her gaze is steady, her eyes anchoring him to her even as he avoids it because it's too much, and she has this trust thrumming through her body which is completely undeserved he thinks, but she's always seen more in him than he's seen in himself, she's always seen through he is to who he could be, and she points him towards - north? it doesn't matter, the metaphors he comes up with for her are never adequate anyway, and then, almost against his will, he hears himself saying, "I don't want to lose you. I don't want to lose you at all."

It's not what he expected to say and it's way more of a confession than he anticipated. He feels his stomach jump into his chest; it feels like he's crossed a line. When Donna said _I don't want to lose you_ it felt like it still could have been friendship; when he'd said it it hadn't, it felt like _I can't live without you_ and uncomfortably close to _I love you_ and he doesn't think either of them know what to do with that.

He shudders a breath out.

She lets go of his fingers, cups his chin and nudges it up to meet her gaze. Finally, finally she's looking into his eyes and she meets his - embarrassment? anguish? He doesn't know anymore - with nothing other than compassion, her eyes open and hopeful and full of undeserved faith. "You haven't lost me, Harvey," she says. "You haven't lost me. I'm here. We're all here."

He hadn't known he'd needed to hear that, to hear he hadn't irrevocably ruined everyone and everything around him. There's so much relief in it that he feels all the rigidness go out of his spine, and he'd thought he was being strong but he'd just been tense, he'd just been scared, and now his body caves in a bit and it's not because he's being weak but because he's letting out fear; he rests his cheek into her palm as her hand slides to cup the side of his face and it's the comfort he's been chasing, and how did he not know it was Donna that had it, it's always Donna, she's always the answer.

It's only an inch or two that separates his cheek from hers, it's something he's avoided for years but not now, and he lets his face fall against hers. She's still holding his hand and his free palm comes up against her jaw, his fingertips tickling into her hair, he can feel her breath against the corner of his mouth, and this is miles away from 'just friends' and it jolts through his chest, the tickling of her breath spiking goosebumps across his neck.

He's not sure if it's him moving her chin or her shifting her neck, it's probably both of them at once but either way his mouth meets hers and she's warm and soft, her lips are just like remembers and nothing like he's imagined and he always thought kissing her again would feel like fireworks but it doesn't, it feels like looking up and finding sunrise from nowhere. She fits her bottom lip between both of his and her teeth graze across the cleft above his lip, sucking lightly, and he's glad that his legs are pushed back against his desk because he's not sure he has the focus to stay upright by himself. He feels something in his soul switch on as she nudges his mouth open and he feels her tongue slide against his, and he thinks that this moment might be worth two years.

She pulls back slightly after a minute to catch her breath, and he's breathing a lot harder than he should be as well. He leans his forehead against her, and her skin is warm and flushed under his hand, her fingers squeezing his, and he keeps his eyes shut against hers because that feels easier; just the taste and touch of her is overwhelming and he thinks adding red hair and brown eyes into the equation would finish him off altogether.

It's a lot more than a kiss, a lot more than some office tryst born from exhaustion and too-short days; whatever is sparking between them has been simmering for years and the spark is almost glorious, but it might be too much for the minutes he has left. So he draws back just a little as she leans in again, huffs out, "Donna, wait. I don't know if this is a good idea. I don't want to…"

"What?"

"… complicate things."

She laughs, and there's just enough wistfulness in it to edge out the heartache. "You have no idea how much simpler this makes everything, do you." And she's against him again before he can answer, her lips on his, making his decision for him, and any further protest is wiped out of his mind as she kisses him into blankness.

Her arms slide up around his neck so she can nudge him more fully against her, her thumbs skating lazily across the back of his head, and his hands drop almost automatically to her waist, arms wrapping and pulling her against him, and now it's not a kiss as much as it is Harvey and Donna dropping, finally dropping all their walls and guards and bullshit rules and just _being_. She feels like the dawn, all light and radiance and his whole body draws towards her, and there are prison bars hunting him but he's never felt closer to freedom.

—

Donna's entrance is only about twenty minutes from Harvey's office door, but it takes them a lot longer than usual this time. The hallway of the firm is a lot further than he had ever noticed before; at least it is when he's abandoned the confident power walk he's cultivated in favour of pressing Donna up against the wall every few steps to lick up her neck and push another wrinkle into her dress from running his hands over her. The elevator doesn't take any longer than usual once they've remembered to push the button for the ground floor, but that's only after Donna has Harvey's tie loosened off and several buttons undone. They hail a cab and that's the hardest moment of the night, sitting next to each other, conscious they're breathing a lot harder than they should be, stealing glances but not quite catching each other's eyes, fingers twitching towards each other but not quite touching because they don't trust themselves or each other not to ruin their driver's night.

They fall out of the cab and kiss into her entrance, up the elevator and spill into her apartment, Harvey just managing to get the door shut before she's backed him up against it, pushing his jacket off his shoulders and she's all passion and it's not just the release of holding back for fifteen minutes in a cab; it's the release of thirteen years of her having to tuck her feelings away and finding ways to love him fully but incompletely, thirteen years of waiting that wasn't really waiting because he always said _we could never_ and that's gone now, it's done, and it's far, far too late for it but it's here and there isn't a minute to waste, and he feels all of it on her lips and in the tips of her fingers as she drags up his arms and makes short work of his shirt buttons.

Harvey starts pulling her dress up, hiking fabric around her hips, ducking his head to run his teeth over her collar bone, and she wraps her arms back around him, hugging her skin under his shirt before pushing it up and over his shoulders. He lets his arms loosen, lets his shirt and jacket drop to the floor, fresh air prickling sweat and goosebumps across his skin, and he slides a hand through to the back of her head, into her hair and pulls her mouth to his, kissing lazy and thoroughly and sliding his tongue against hers and he's in utter disbelief that this is happening, that an hour ago he was ready to bury himself in paperwork for the night and now he's in her apartment and thirteen years of dreams and what-ifs and fantasies are all paling in comparison to her, real and warm against him.

He steps out of his shoes without letting his lips off hers; she does the same and he's pushed her dress up enough to catch the hem with his hands. Donna raises her arms on either side of his temples, framing him against her door and leaning into him so he can tug her dress up and over in one fluid motion. He drops it, runs his hands up her back, and his fingertips trace her spine and her curves fit against his palms like they were built a matching pair, and he thinks that she's the single greatest thing he's ever touched.

Donna hooks a finger into his waistband, sliding her tongue against his, and draws him backwards down the hallway and into her room. His cock twitches at that; he's already pushing against his briefs and his pants and she must notice because she starts undoing his belt as they walk and he's not sure how she's managing when he can barely remember which way is up anymore and she must be magic, he thinks.

She just gets the top button on his pants loosened when her legs hit the back of the mattress and she stops. Harvey keeps on, walking her down onto the bed and sliding his body over the top of hers. In another world, in another lifetime he'd probably have spent half the night on foreplay, all flirting and laughing and teasing, but this wasn't another world and it wasn't another lifetime and he just wanted her, just wanted to be with her and in her and wanted to tell her he loved her and it's amazing how facing prison tends to clarify things.

Donna has her hands on his waistband, pushing his pants down over his hips, and he ducks his head to her neck, teasing his lips and teeth over her skin, and he feels a deep 'hmm' vibrate in the base of her throat. It's not quite a moan, not yet, but it's close, and Harvey feels a deep sigh rattle past his vocal chords when she gets her hand under his briefs and grips his cock lightly. He breathes, 'Donna,' and it's involuntarily; he's been whispering her name into his ceiling for years anyway and it's like breathing to him now.

He unhooks her bra as she teases her hand along him, and her other hand goes to the back of his head as he licks slowly down her neck to her breasts, scratching at his scalp in encouragement as he nudges his lips over her nipple, sucks it into his mouth. She moans properly then, a low murmur catching her vocal chords as she breathes out heavily. She pulls a leg up to his hip and shifts her hips against him, seeking friction, and he feels his stomach hollow out as she thumbs the tip of his cock, pushes his briefs down, and runs her palm along his full length.

"Fuck, Donna," he mutters, and he brings a hand up to tease her other nipple; she arches against him and he feels her moan more than he hears it. He skates his hand down her side, tickling her skin under his fingers, over her ribs and across her hip and stomach before nudging his fingers lightly along her pussy, drawing his name from her lips as he nudges his thumb against her clit. He circles it lazily, sucks her nipple between his teeth and she moans deep in her throat and just that nearly finishes him off, she's wanton and gorgeous and he's never known another women who could push him to the edge with her voice alone. So he slides a finger inside her, still rubbing slow circles over her clit, and she arches her head back into the bed. He licks up to her exposed neck, letting her moans hum against his lips, and she's wet and tight around his hand, and she's stroking his cock and there's no way this is real.

"Harvey. Please," she says, and she grabs his hip with her free hand, nudging him towards her. Harvey slides his finger from her, shifts his hips against her, letting his forehead fall against hers, and he opens his eyes at the same time she does, her eyes are blown black with lust and need and she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen so he just watches her, taking all of who she is in. She still has him in her hand so he just lets her guide him in and he sinks into her, holding her eyes with his, and it's still not fireworks, it's coming home, and there's something unspoken happening that's as inevitable as life and death and they both just stop and stare at each other, tangling hands slowly through each others hair.

"Donna," he murmurs, and she just smiles sadly and says she knows and it's okay. He wants to apologise, wants to tell her he's sorry he waited so long, he's sorry he pled guilty and he's sorry he's a fucking moron who's only figured this all out when he has so little time left, but there's no point and he can see she knows it all anyway, so he kisses her instead, slow and languid, and then she pushes her hips against his and he starts moving slowly. He hikes his hips against hers, drawing out and then sinking back into her, and she holds his gaze and it's almost too much straight away, so he drops his face into the crook of her neck, slides his hands to either side of her head so he can push up and find leverage, and keeps pushing in and out.

He starts slow but he can't hold that pace for long because she's all around him, rocking against him, finding his rhythm, and she's slick and tight and warm, and she's moaning in time with his thrusts now and _holy fuck_ how had he ever managed to convince himself this was a bad idea. She says his name, he says hers, building pace and speed almost against his will. He pushes up on his hands, finding the right angle to hit her just so, and he finds it and she pushes her head back into the mattress, goddamn she's breathtaking, and he isn't going to last. If it was anyone else he probably would have felt embarrassed, being pushed so close to the edge so quickly, but this is Donna and she's always had him completely anyway so how did he think he'd be able to hold this back from her either.

He slides a hand between them, finds her clit, and strokes two fingers over her while he pushes in and out. She gasps, her voice pitching higher, says 'fuck, Harvey', and he can feel the muscles around him tensing, tightening, and he drops his head besides hers, he wants to be closer, and she breathes into his ear that she's going to come, and he thinks it's about the most profound thing he's ever heard. And then she's breaking underneath him, orgasm rippling through her stomach, and the sight of her completely gone underneath him is all it takes for Harvey to follow, and he thinks he says her name as his brain blinks white.

—

He hadn't intended to fall asleep, and he hadn't really; it was more like being with Donna had short circuited his brain and he'd blanked out in a haze of dopamine for a few moments. The world edged out and he'd just let himself drift, the sensation of her skin against his the only thing anchoring him to reality. That had never happened before. He wondered idly if it was just a byproduct of thirteen years of fantasy, or if this is how it was always meant to be when you were with your soulmate and he'd just been waiting his whole life to find out.

Light scratching at the base of his skull brings him back to reality; he's still draped over her, his head resting next to hers, she's looking at him and smiling; it's a smile he's never seen before, he thinks maybe it's just for him and just for moments like this, and it's like she's wrestled all the peace out of the universe just for them for that moment.

"Hey," he murmurs, and he shifts a little to settle next to her, his arm across her waist and his leg tangled between hers.

"Hey." She runs a hand over his face, fingertips tickling over his skin, and he thinks that he'd walk through fire for that smile.

"I'm sorry it took me so long to get here."

"I know."

"I'm sorry we only have a couple of days."

"I know." She kisses him slowly, and she's smiling against him still but he thinks he can taste the edges of grief.

"It's two years," she says. "I waited thirteen. Two more won't feel like anything."

"I can't ask that."

"You're not asking me. I'm telling you."

It's said like a joke even though it isn't, and he tries to smile but he can feel tears stinging. "I know."

"It's going to be okay."

"I know."

In that moment, he thinks he really believes her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This multichapter will be a challenge for me as I am almost exclusively someone who thrives in the one-shot style of writing, but let's see how we go. Enjoy the angst! As always, please let me know what you think - your reviews are so encouraging and help me write better.


	3. 3

Today is the day and there's nothing left to do.

He could go into the office and shuffle papers around and try to keep busy, try to feel useful. But there's nothing of any real consequence he can turn his hand to, and anyway he sent his official resignation in around 1am, after staring at his laptop on the kitchen bench for twenty minutes, perched on a bar stool and trying to think of something else to tidy away, someone else to contact. But everything was tidy and anybody he could reach out to would be asleep so there wasn't any point.

So he opened up his drafts folder, opened up the last email sitting there, and pulled it up, staring at the blinking line at the end of the final sentence for ten minutes, at words like 'formal resignation', at heartfelt thanks and regrets, shaking fingers teasing over the trackpad as he cycled through working up the courage and then chickening out on hitting send.

Donna had appeared behind him, because her sixth sense probably told her something was up, sliding her hands around his waist and hugging him against her. She knocked her chin lightly against his shoulder, looking over the curve of his shoulder to his screen.

"Big moment," she'd murmured, pressing a kiss into his shoulder blade.

"Mmm." He hadn't trusted himself to say any actual words out loud, because he could feel the lump in his throat when he swallowed and he didn't want her to hear his voice crack. It wasn't that he didn't want to be vulnerable in front of her, exactly. He just wanted to show her he could handle the next months and years.

It was largely a futile effort, he knew. There wasn't any point in hiding his vulnerability from her anyway - hiding the crack in his voice was no help when she could tell how he was through his bedroom wall, which was why she'd come to find him in the first place. He knows her as instinctively as she knows him, and he knows she knows, she always has known and will forever know.

She can feel things in the air. Some people can smell rain on the horizon, or feel distant happenings in the vibration of the earth. But Donna can feel him. She senses him in the oxygen around her. She can read his thoughts in the atmosphere and she feels his heart in the vibration of his breath and Harvey imagines this is what the faithful must feel like when they feel God walk into the room.

Besides which, he'd felt tears stinging at his eyes which she saw in the reflection of flickering screen light, and she was leaning against his back so he knew she felt his breath catch ragged in his lungs. So she had reached around his chest, cupped his chin and turned his face towards her. He'd let her, let his face drop as she did, let his forehead fall against her cheek, let her comfort him. She'd run her hand over his chest and torso, up to his temple, lightly teasing his hair, and he'd just lain his hands loosely on her hips, breathed her in, and let his mind be still for a moment.

She waited, then murmured, "Come on. It's your last night. Let's get through this part and we can worry about the rest in a couple of years. This is just words. Jessica knows how you feel about her. Right now I just want to be with you, Harvey."

She was right, which didn't help him feel less guilt or terror, but her voice was steady and her hands weren't shaking, which did.

He hit send.

—

He'd blinked awake slowly. The sun was up and coming through the windows, warming his skin with late spring heat, and he was on his back with one arm splayed out over the edge of the bed. His other arm had been hijacked and Donna was using it as a pillow and he couldn't feel his fingers but he didn't mind, there was a steak of red hair tickling against his wrist and he could feel her breath deep and even against his neck.

It had only been the third night since Donna had pulled him into his apartment and taken him into her body and had punched brightness into the dark all around him but she'd been in his bed and under his skin every night since then. He hadn't realised he'd been staring into a tunnel with no end in sight until she'd fallen asleep under him that first night and he had been hit with the realisation that she was the light at the end of it all and goddamn if he wasn't going to make it back to her.

The first two nights felt like a desperate rush to make up for every missed opportunity over the last thirteen years - they'd gotten little sleep, they'd both woken at different times in the night and pulled each other in, trying to convince themselves is was all real and happening and that they weren't caught in a mutual fantasy. So they'd grabbed onto each other, physical, primal, all touch and tension and guttural noises, _Harvey_ 's and _Donna_ 's mingled with hushed moans and _fuck_ and _there_ and _oh god I'm going to come_ pulled from each other in the dark of his apartment with the moonlight watching on.

They'd been almost as blatant in the office. Harvey still had mountains of work to do, and he wouldn't let it go undone so she had come in to help him wade through it. But it hadn't been long before the glances they'd been stealing from each other for more than a decade transitioned into Harvey catching Donna's eye and Donna catching his and then into them outright staring at each other and then Donna pulling him into the file room so she could lock the door and he could push her against the shelves and she could hitch herself onto the research table and pull him between her legs. At times it had bordered on obsessive, and Harvey had supposed that he shouldn't really be pouring his entire being into her when he was about to be sent down for two years, that his instincts weren't healthy, but obsession never is, not really, and she was the dawn at the end of a very long tunnel, so he ran after it.

Last night had been different though. Something had shifted, and instead of them crawling over each other and knocking the sheets from the bed in their rush and their passion, they simply lay, facing each other, Donna resting her cheek on her hands and Harvey using his bicep as a pillow, and they'd talked. Talked, laughed, shared conspiracy theories about the rumours that Donna ran her fingers through every day, they talked about family and friends, they talked a little about the future until it got too close to talk of marriage and babies and they'd both blushed and changed the subject and they'd kissed slowly and effortlessly, like they'd had all the time in the world. They dozed off, woke up again, ordered food in and Harvey dropped pizza in his lap, and she laughed with her head thrown back and slowly made love to him in the shower when he went to clean himself up and she followed him in. They'd eventually fallen asleep sometime before dawn as the sun started to sketch the skyline in gentle relief and the distant sounds of traffic started to pick up, filtering through the open window.

He nudges his phone on his bedside table; it's just after nine and he has eight hours.

—

He spends one watching her sleep.

—

He spends one getting ready. There's nothing to pack, but he showers and dresses like he's going to trial and forces himself to eat breakfast because if he doesn't she won't either and it feels important that she eats something. She gets bagels and coffee while he's showering and it's a tiny gesture, far down the list on the things Donna has done for him, and it settles into his heart for some specific reason he doesn't understand but that he'll ask her about someday, and that's when he knows that he wants to marry her.

He's known for years of course; hell, he's pretty sure he knew when she shook his hand in that bar and told him her name, but that 'marry me' has always been a fantasy and a fairy tale and this one is different, this is an almost physical voice that introduces itself, says _I'm going to marry this woman_ in a way that snaps his heart away from it being a fairy tale and into being inevitable.

He doesn't ask her out loud. It feels unfair on today of all days and she probably knows anyway. So instead he says 'good bagel' and kisses her with his mouth full and she laughs, snorts against his lips and it's light and easy and it feels like they're going to go to work today and then get dinner after and come home to fold into each other, and not that he's going to walk away from her past barbed wire and put on a blue button down with a number sewn on and not touch her for two years.

—

He spends one with Mike and Rachel. They drop by, and there's a mix of bittersweet and uncertainty in the air, and nobody wants to talk about the coming days but nobody can think of anything else to talk about that feels like it's important enough to vocalise, so it's awkward and quiet at first and Harvey is pretty sure he knows what his own wake will be like now.

So he pours drinks and they settle into his living room and pretty soon the conversation drifts to all the times they escaped trouble by the skin of their teeth, all the times Harvey schooled Mike and Mike surprised Harvey, all the times Donna and Rachel pulled strings in the background, and they're all mostly laughing, but Harvey can see the calculations going on behind Mike's eyes; he's putting patterns together and thumbing over memories and Harvey knows he's trying to think of something to knock two years down to months or days. Mike is struggling, he knows, struggling with the knowledge that if he'd left for Gibbs' office thirty seconds earlier they would be having a very different conversation right now.

So Harvey nods Mike aside, pulls him into the bedroom, and says, "Mike, you need to stop killing yourself over this."

"Harvey, this is all my fault, it should be me."

"Well first of all, it can't be you, because you're a huge sissy and you'd get eaten alive in prison," he says, and Mike laughs but there's a sadness to it. "And secondly, if it wasn't for this, I probably wouldn't be with Donna. If this is what it takes to wake my dumb ass up, then I don't regret a moment, Mike."

"You know you could have just listened to literally everyone telling you that you belong together, right? This seems like an overly complicated solution."

"Hey you know me, always doing things the hard way." Harvey steps in to Mike, embraces him in a hug, and it quickly slips from a token gesture to something solid and significant, and he can feel the stress in Mike's shoulders so he says it's going to be okay, and he's been saying that a lot lately, so it's either true, or it is the furthest thing from the truth. He's not sure which.

Mike grips the back of Harvey's neck before releasing him. He looks like he wants to say something but thinks better of it, says instead, "I'm glad you found your way to Donna."

"Me too."

"We'll look after her."

"I know."

Mike claps his shoulder as he turns back to the living room. "Oh, and try not to be an asshole to everyone in there. I know everybody in the firm has personally wanted to stab you at least once and people in prison actually have knives."

Harvey smiles. "No promises."

—

He spends one with Donna in bed.

Despite the day being early, Harvey had managed to put away several whiskies by the time Mike and Rachel left, and he wasn't drunk, wasn't even really tipsy, but his inhibitions were down just enough for the constant low pull towards Donna to become irresistible. He'd started off innocently enough, laying his hand on Donna's knee while she chatted to Rachel and he held an entirely separate conversation with Mike. It turned into him rubbing slow circles over her back, and it still would have looked innocent to Mike and Rachel but he could feel goosebumps prickling under her shirt and the tension rolling under her shoulder blades and he knew Donna had drunk just enough as well.

They'd said their goodbyes and as soon as the door clicked shut behind them Donna had pulled Harvey to her, kissed him and slid her robe from her shoulders, and Harvey doesn't think he'll ever get used to a half naked Donna taking his hand and pulling him into the bedroom.

It starts off all passion and lust, clothes and inhibitions discarded, but soon slips into a languid, lazy, beautiful hour. Harvey kisses his way down her neck, over her torso and her stomach and down, sliding his tongue over her underwear, he finds her through fabric and slicks his mouth over her, sucking lightly over her clit, and she pulls in a hollow breath and and runs her hands into his hair to hold him against her but he doesn't need the encouragement. He teases for long moments until she's almost begging, and then he slides her underwear down her legs and two fingers inside her a moment later, and she arches off the mattress with a low groan and he loves the noise she makes so he lowers his mouth back to her clit and teases her with his tongue, curls his fingers inside of her to find just the right angle, and there's a point where she just forgets to breathe altogether so he supposes he's found it.

He watches her while he sucks over her clit and feels her grip around his fingers, her skin drawn in alabaster and freckles and every part of her body is impossible, and hearing her moan his name sets him on edge, he loves the sound of her coming slowly apart under him, and he wants to stay here forever. "God Donna, you're beautiful," he takes a moment to say, and she hooks a leg over his shoulder for a better angle. He pushes deeper and she moans in a way that sounds like all the air punches out her lungs all at once and it only takes a few more moments before he feels her orgasm thrum through her skin and she's wordless and breathless and the whole world goes quiet for them for a moment.

He kisses back up her body while she catches her breath and her wits and she's sailing on dopamine. He presses his lips against hers and she smiles drowsily and murmurs, "you're really good at that, you know," and he huffs a laugh against her mouth, which turns into a slow exhale as she takes him in hand and strokes him slowly and firmly. He lets his eyes shut, and for a moment he just lets himself be.

And then she's gently pressing up, turning him and pressing him against the pillows, and she works her way down his body as well, and quite against any conscious decision, Harvey's head drops back against the headboard as she grips the base of his cock firmly and slips her mouth over his tip.

_Fuck._

He forces himself to breathe as she sucks him slowly and firmly, pressing her tongue along him, stroking his shaft at the same time. He says 'fuck' out loud when she releases him with a wet pop and slides her hand over the top of his cock, smearing preccome over him and good lord she's going to be the death of him. She smiles at that, she loves seeing him helpless, it's the only place he's openly surrendered, so she says 'God Harvey you're hot' as she lowers her mouth back to him and then pulls another strangled breath from his mouth and he tries to say something back but he's lost the use of his vocabulary.

She pulls him right to the edge and then, right when his stomach muscles are tensing and he's gasping at the ceiling with an arm thrown over his eyes because the sensations are coming in a flood and he can't deal with them, she lets him out of her mouth and relaxes her hand around the base of his cock. She kisses his hip bone lightly and smiles as she watches him slowly gather his senses back together, and just as he's able to open his eyes properly she moves back up, kisses him slowly, slicking her tongue over his as she reaches down to take him in hand, positions her hips over him, she sinks onto him and they both exhale deep against each others mouths as she does. Harvey's moan turns into 'Donna' and he runs his hands up her ass and holds her hips. She lays her hands flat against his chest as she rocks over him, finding a slow, rich rhythm, and he circles his thumbs over her skin, pushes his hips against hers, matching her speed, and it's slow and deep and it's not making love, not exactly, but there's also something far beyond fucking happening to them, and even though they've slid into bed together multiple times in the last few days, this feels like a step further.

It feels like they're both staring at the horizon of forever and neither of them are terrified anymore.

She slowly, slowly rocks against him, holding speed, steady and deep and deliberate. Part of him loves it and part of him wants to speed up, needs to speed up, but she holds it slow and it's maddening and it's everything and she's gorgeous. She pushes slow, building by pushing harder, firmer, more thorough, until he slides a hand between them to find her clit, and he does that slowly too, and they build and rock until they both break apart together.

—

He spends another watching her sleep, propped up on his elbow while she dozes on her front, her pillow hugged up under her chest and her other hand stretched out towards him, and he trails his fingers up her back and thinks about all the times he wished for this moment.

—

He spends one wandering the streets of New York with Donna.

He loves New York. There was time where he thought he wouldn't love any single person as much as he loved the city - the lights and hustle and breath that only New York has. It's a cliche to say there's nowhere else like New York, but it's true, there isn't, it really is a living, breathing space with it's own gravitational pull and it's own language, it's own culture, and it feels like it exists outside the bounds of the rules that every other city works in.

He loves Donna, but New York is his most longstanding crush.

They walk the streets, aiming vaguely towards the firm, but it's mostly Harvey giving Donna a tour of his relationship with the city. He points out firsts - first subway ride (he still gets the subway sometimes, he likes the hustle and hostility of it), first time he flagged a cab down, first hot dog from a street vendor which Harvey is pretty sure gave him food poisoning but also kickstarted his love of shitty food stalls in side alleys.

Donna squeezes his hand and leans into his shoulder, smiles like she's learned something about him, so he says 'what?"

"Oh, it's just … all your stories are about small things. Not about getting your apartment or the firm or your first limo ride. You've been earning how much for how long, you're powerful and successful and you could brag about any number of things and yet you still think about your first subway ride." She smiles at a thought that's popped into her head. "I always knew it."

"Knew what?"

She looks up at him. "That you try so hard to be an asshole but you're really a big sentimental idiot."

Harvey points down at the pavement in front of them. "Oh, and this is where I broke up with my girlfriend because she called me an asshole and an idiot and pretended it was a compliment."

She laughs into his bicep and he drops a kiss on the top of her head.

He buys her a pretzel and coffee, and they talk about nothing and everything all at once, about the streets around them and where they should live once Harvey gets out and the current Yankees lineup (Donna just nods) and the latest exhibition at the Met (Harvey just nods). They don't do the cliched things - they don't kiss in Central Park, they don't take the ferry past the Statue of Liberty, they don't walk through Times Square. But they talk about their favourite bodegas and Harvey tells Donna about all the dive bars with good jazz, and Donna says she'll go while he's away, and it feels right, it feels normal and natural, it feels like like _this is it_ and _she's the one_ and he just has to get them through two years. And if he can't, he knows Donna will.

—

He spends one at the firm.

Donna flags a taxi down, and they take the elevator up, and Harvey's barely in the foyer before Louis has thrown himself at him in a bear hug that traps Harvey's arms by his sides and he looks helplessly at Donna while she smiles at his discomfort and raises an eyebrow at him. And then Harvey hugs Louis back, because he's a pain in the ass and he's flakey and volatile, but more than that, he's a friend.

Louis makes Harvey promise to call him once a month at least to tell him how he's going and offers to represent him pro bono, and Harvey drops a hand onto his shoulder, says 'thank you, Louis,' and Louis wells up and says something about taking a day and retreats to his office. Harvey starts to follow him, but Donna takes his wrist and tugs lightly, stopping him.

"He needs time," she murmurs. "He wants to be strong for you. Give him space. He'll be here when you get out."

"He's my lawyer now, he'll probably be waiting in my cell for me. "

Donna cocks her head to the side. "I wouldn't bet against that."

Katrina embraces him in the awkward but sweet way she does, and wishes him well, and says if there's anything she can do to let her know. Harvey hugs her and kisses her on the cheek and says thank you, and it's a thank you for her words but it's also a thank you for all the work he knows she's going to pick up without fuss or fanfare.

Jessica calls him an idiot and an asshole and then hugs him tightly. She's extended him a bonus for his final salary payment - it's significant and it will be waiting for him when he gets out, and it's enough to get him back on his feet while he figures out what he's going to do. She also gives him a receipt for forward payment on his apartment - it's all 24 months paid in advance. He tries to refuse and she swears at him and hugs him again, and she feels so much like family that it's like his parents are telling him that everything is going to be okay, they'll take care of it, and he's just grateful.

He takes a few moments to walk the halls; it's the last time he'll do so, certainly the last time as a senior partner, the last time even as a lawyer. It's always felt like his firm; even when he was a kid in the mailroom he felt a sense of ownership for it and entitlement to it. He's always walked the halls like he owns them.

He passes through the bullpen; pauses at his old desk. He stands in his office, half packed up, taking in the view for a last time. He pours whisky, he looks through boxes of records, he taps the top of his desk. His comeuppance has been too long coming and too quick all at once and he feels a weird mix of fear for the next two years and relief that it's over, the lies are done, he can breathe easy again.

He is going to have to work hard to keep his head above water and he's not sure he can do it, but he thinks about Mike and Donna and he wouldn't have changed a thing.

"Harvey."

He looks up. It's Donna.

"Time to go."

—

He spends his last hour with Donna in the parking lot of a federal prison with a shitty cup of coffee in a takeaway cup.

They sit on the hood of Ray's car, mostly in silence. Ray has found a way to make himself scarce, and Harvey holds his coffee in one hand and with the other links his fingers through Donna's. She rubs her thumb against his and he thinks he'll miss the small things like that most of all. Not the huge gestures she's made, not the train tracks she's thrown herself on for him, but the way she touches his arm when she walks past, the way she smiles when she sees him, the way she can call him on his bullshit by raising one eyebrow at him. Donna seems larger than life to most but to Harvey she is a labyrinth of tiny moments and quirks, complex and layered and fascinating, and she's the single most incredible person he's ever known.

"Okay," he says finally, and he wants to say much more than _okay_ but sometimes there just aren't the words to sum up what he's feeling and what's facing so _okay_ just has to suffice. This 'okay' is a show of strength and a plead for comfort and a signal that everything is about to change all at once.

"Okay," she says, and he hears the same layers in her voice that are in his.

He stands, shakes the cup out, feels her arms slide around him and hug her against him, and she has her cheek pressed against his shoulder blades. He lifts one of her hands to his mouth, kisses her palm, turns in her embrace and wraps her in a hug that's half _it'll be okay_ and half _oh god what are we going to do_ and he's not sure which half is coming across more strongly. She's crying, he is too, and he half heartedly tries to blink his eyes back under control because he doesn't think walking into prison intake in floods of tears will strike a helpful first impression but he also kind of doesn't give a shit so he lets it be.

She draws his head back so she can kiss him, and she kisses him exactly how he'd expect Donna to kiss someone when she knew she wouldn't be able to for two more years. It's passionate but not wonton, more about connection than arousal, and he can feel _I love you_ in the movement of her mouth against his.

Harvey can't think of anything better to do or say so he just kisses her back the same way.

It's Donna who pulls away, murmuring that it's time, but he doesn't want to, god he doesn't want to, the feeling he's been pushing away since the verdict is suddenly real and he finally, _finally_ has her and now it's going to be two years and how did he only get three days? What the hell is wrong with him, he's an idiot and he's ruining her life along with his.

He clings to her like he's drowning and she's dry land, and she knows, she knows everything as usual.

"I love you, Harvey," Donna murmurs into his neck.

"Love you," he says back, and he'd like to say more but his throat's closed up so he swallows thickly instead.

In any other circumstance, telling your girlfriend of 72 hours that you love them just before you go to prison would ring alarm bells. But this isn't normal circumstances, this is Donna, and it's almost natural, why wouldn't he say it, and he meant what he said to Mike - if it takes two years of prison to wake him up to what's been staring him in the face for thirteen years, if it's two years that gets him to _I love you_ and _I want you_ and _maybe_ to rings and promises and _shall we?_ then he'll embrace each day like it's been fucking gift wrapped even while he hates every second of it and even though he's ruining her life and his too.

He manages, "I'll miss you."

"I know. I'll visit as soon as I can. "

"I know."

"We're going to get through this."

"I know."

He turns and walks through the gates. Klaxons blare as they shut behind him.

He knows if he looks back it'll kill him, so he doesn't.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for the continued support for this story and for being an amazing fandom in general! Your feedback is welcomed and encouraged - it helps me improve and lets me know if I'm on the right track or not!


	4. 4

It's not handing his possessions over to be thrown into a paper bag that does it, and it's not giving his name to a clerk and being handed a number in return. It's not the bars, or the guards, or the guns. Of all things, it was the click and buzz of the electric razor turning on that landed Harvey square in the grip of reality.

Harvey has never been as vain about his hair as his reputation would lead everyone to believe. He's cut it shorter and shorter over the years, hoping he'll find the magic formula that lets him look like New York's best closer without putting in the effort he feels compelled to. He keeps it slicked back for the very reason that he doesn't have the patience for anything more. Having his hair short, close to shaved - it was something he'd harboured a secret desire to do, and so he thinks this should feel liberating.

But it's not his choice now, so it doesn't. He resents the pull of the clippers, the flush of cool across his scalp, and he hates the helplessness of being forced to just sit while someone else makes the most basic of decisions on his behalf. He knows about prison, and not just intellectually - he's put enough people away and gotten enough people out to understand what he's walking into. He had readied himself for the physical unease and the walls and the bars. But he hadn't been emotionally prepared for how instant the shift is from his old world to this one. It's like being jolted awake from a dead sleep, and there's a hollow disorientation that follows every instruction he's given and everything that happens to him.

He's trying not to admit to himself that he's close to being overwhelmed with the fundamental shift in reality happening around him. Someone is barking rules at him but his heart is thumping in his chest and he feels a sheen of sweat creeping over his body so he can't grab on to the words being thrown his way. He's quietly thankful that he gets told to strip and is shoved into a cold shower, because it short circuits the panic attack threatening around the edges of his consciousness. It worries him; he hasn't had a panic attack in over a year and he's not quite sure what he'll do if prison drags him back into that space, into a world where every so often he drowns under the weight of his own anxiety. Being physically trapped is one thing, but he's smart and determined and even if being smart and determined fails him he's also stubborn. Being mentally trapped on top of that, he thinks, will be too much and too far. So he leans his palms against the concrete and lets frigid water send shivers up his spine and he forces his breathing under control and tells himself _one thing at a time_.

The water is cut off too soon, and the guard who's been put in charge of him tosses him a towel and a uniform. The number he was given by the clerk is sewn into the pocket and it's just another shred of his humanity extracted from his soul and another part of his being replaced with the mechanics of incarceration. The shirt is a little too small, the pants a little too loose, and he thinks they probably do that on purpose.

He catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror as they pull his hands behind him and snap handcuffs back on his wrists. It looks like another person has stolen his body, he thinks. He's in prison blues, close cropped hair and the beginnings of stubble whispering across his face. He looks like any number of men he's eyed across a court room while a guilty verdict has been read out. He's never paid much attention to his eyes but now he sees them, sees himself haunted and he can't help but compare himself to a cornered animal and he doesn't think that's a normal thought to have.

He's walked through the main block in cuffs, and he figures that's just to remind him who's in charge now. Around him, other prisoners stop to look, and a quiet falls over the block as he's guided through, and he doesn't know if that's normal or if he's managed to land in a block where he's responsible for everyone else being there alongside himself. He has to force himself to hold his head up - he's not a coward but he's not prepared for the level of intimidation in the atmosphere. It's soaked into the walls and Harvey tries to grab onto courage and confidence, but he knows nobody gives one shit about his reputation or his intelligence or his three piece suits in here. He taps into every ounce of bravado he has just to get to his cell door without letting sweat pepper over his forehead.

He's uncuffed at the door of his cell, and the guard tells him when the lights turn off and on and that he's expected to be ready for roll call at several intervals in the day and Harvey nods but he isn't really listening and he walks into a room that's bare except for a toilet, bed and shelf, and he knew that but knowing something and seeing it are different and he's pretty sure he feels the ground underneath him shift.

Louis and Mike had managed to work some kind of magic and get Harvey a cell by himself - they'd argued that Harvey was someone who has spent their life putting people into the same prison he was about to walk into, and having other inmates with access to his cell was too dangerous. The judge had mercifully agreed, and having his own cell should have felt like a significant silver lining, but right now it just feels like he's been abandoned by humanity itself and he has to take a moment to force air into his lungs as the guard behind him snaps his cuffs off.

The door clicking shut behind him sounds like a gunshot.

And then, silence.

The last few weeks and months have been all activity, panicked and rushed, trying to fit in as much as possible. He'd become an expert in more work, more phone calls, more activity, less sleep. A sense of background panic and frantic drive had become a constant companion. And then, when there was no more work to do, he'd grabbed onto Donna, and the frantic drive to build his case and finish his work became a frantic need to make every minute with her worth more than he could reasonably expect to squeeze out of it.

What he hadn't prepared for was the moment where there was nothing left to do, and it rushes at him from nowhere with all the emotion and panic that he's been avoiding since he beat Mike to Gibbs' door.

His legs are suddenly unsteady, and his shoulders bump back against the door as his body searches for support. And then his knees give, and he slides down to the floor, and he's not in shock exactly, but his body isn't willing to catch up with his brain and so he finds himself slumped against the door with his chest heaving and his shaking palms pressing into his eye sockets. It's not a panic attack, it's something else all together. A panic attack feels like something external pressing in on him, but this is something deep inside him screaming that things are wrong and out of place and there's nothing he can do about it, so he just sits with his knees against his chest and waits it out.

"Fuck," he says to the ceiling when he can speak again.

—

Donna sits in silence as Ray drives her back to Manhattan. She can feel her phone buzzing in her pocket - Rachel or Mike checking up on her she guesses - but she doesn't take it out. She can't handle a conversation with anyone right now, and even if she was willing to try texting she doesn't think she could focus on the screen. It's not tears; it's just that her mind is hazy and she's preoccupied by what the next week is going to look like. She thinks she should be ambitious and think about the next two years, but if she's honest even the next 24 hours looks insurmountable.

The firm, without Harvey arriving slightly later than he should with a secret smile and without a conspiratorial nod to whatever gossip she gleaned from yesterdays secretary huddle.

The firm, without his power walk and certainty and movie quotes.

His office, without the stolen glances and the smiles and the winks he throws her through glass walls.

Her job, without the very reason her job exists.

She doesn't even know who she works for any more.

Ray tries a few times to strike up a conversation with her. His voice is cracked and raw - he's hurting too, Harvey has been a staunch friend to him over the years and it's not easy to suddenly lose someone who you see every day, who you discuss jazz with, who you engage in a years long trivia contest with, who you consider more than a client and more than a customer. But Donna can't summon anything for him, and she just looks out the window until he quietly leaves her to her thoughts.

She's hollow and numb, with flashes of bright panic punching through. He's gone and she's alone and what the fuck is she meant to do now. She remembers that she's smart, and capable, and fiercely independent, but Harvey is like oxygen - he's always been there and she doesn't always take notice of his presence but when he's gone life feels like an impossibility. He's always been the inevitable force in her life and now that he isn't she feels like she's learning to breathe without him.

She lets the world pass through outside her window, wrapped up in her own memories of the last weeks. It's been a nightmare, but there's been light around the edges of all the dark. Harvey had finally told her he loved her, in a way where he couldn't deny or backpedal. He finally punched through his own walls to get to her, he finally got over his insecurity and fear and reached out to grab her. Donna had been teetering on the edge of him for so long that it only took the smallest nudge to push her over the edge into him, and he'd taken a running leap.

She wasn't naive - Harvey wasn't 'fixed'. He was full to the brim with struggle and issue and suspicion, he couldn't reconcile the space between who he wanted to be and who he was, he wasn't suddenly a different person, and he certainly wasn't ready. But prison has a way of clarifying what's important, and Harvey had realised being ready to be with Donna wasn't as important as being with Donna, and he jumped.

She would have jumped too if she wasn't already well past the edge.

She feels different; like something has physically shifted inside and around her. There's a deep irony in the reality that Donna and Harvey had finally found their way to each other and were now as far apart as they'd ever been. She sees herself in the reflection of the car window and she doesn't recognise herself. She looks like her but not at all. She's never thought someone could truly look hunted, not really, it's a handy but inaccurate metaphor, but here she is staring herself down and that's the only word she can fathom.

Ray pulls over, asks if she wants assistance up to her door; Donna says no. If she's honest she should probably say yes - her legs don't feel up to the task, but she can't bear to make small talk at her door, can't bear having someone feeling pity for her, she's not a woman who falls apart because her - what, boyfriend? - is gone, she's independent and strong and there's a pride in that she can't let go of. So she finds her way to her door by herself.

Closing it behind her sounds like a thunderclap, and the world around her goes quiet.

The last few weeks, Harvey had pulled her into a world in frantic motion. He'd been a man possessed; pulling the threads of his entire life together to create some sense that he's left solid ground for everyone else to walk on. And as she always did Donna had leapt into the fray alongside him, working into the late hours, bringing food when he'd forgotten to eat and insight when he was too scattered to think straight, pulling the best out of him and the people around him and then something between them crumbled and she pulled him into her bed and her body as well. It had been a heady mix of work and play, of working through endless lists of things to do until she felt exhaustion gripping her behind her eyes, but then he'd look at her with a specific dark want she'd never seen in his eyes before and the fire it lit inside her banished any thought of sleep and she would call Ray and take him home to fold herself into his whole being. The whole thing felt like a dream.

She hadn't prepared herself for waking up from it and the silence of him not being there.

She feels the bump in her knees as they give and she slips to the ground, and the door is the only thing that holds her upright. Her breath is catching and shallow and she wants to cry but she presses the back of her hand to her mouth because she feels like Harvey will know if she falls apart and she has to keep his world together for him now alongside her own, if they're even separate anymore, and look after it until he can get back to it. He's gone away for all of them and she owes him somehow, owes him her strength and steadiness, so she rags her breath into her lungs and forces it back out slowly and waits for her heart to stop hammering in her chest.

She still feels tears stinging, and murmurs, "godammit, Harvey," towards the carpet.

—

Donna would probably just be pulling up to her apartment, he thinks, which means he's been sitting slumped against his cell door for far too long. He thinks somewhere deep down that he needs to pull it together, that Donna will know if he doesn't, and she'll worry, and he has too much to handle without making Donna worry, so he pushes to his feet and takes several deep breaths, willing his body back under his control.

He makes his bed, because it's the only thing he can do, and then he sits and makes a plan. He figures he has two years and if he doesn't come up with something more robust than 'wait for two years to be over' he'll fall apart pretty quickly. So he starts with a plan for the week, starting with visiting the warden tomorrow, to find out how he can ward off inevitable boredom and stagnation and hopefully avoid getting shanked in the bathroom, and it's not going to change anything for him, not really, but it's a start, and it helps.

It's not long before he hears the distant clunk of industrial switches, and the light in his cell blinks out, plunging him into the humid dark of the evening. He slips under the cover of his bed, rough wool scratching at his skin, and thinks about Donna. It's far from the first night he's lain awake, staring at the ceiling and thinking about Donna. It is, however, the first time that he's prevented from going to her by walls and barbed wire instead of by his own fear and insecurity and stubborn pride.

Harvey had finally broken out of the prison he'd built himself only to find he was now trapped in one he hadn't.

He curls onto his side and pretends she's sleeping next to him.

—

Two days in and he gets to make a phone call and he calls Donna. He leans against the wall next to the phone, and waits what feels like an age while the phone clicks into the outside world and asks about charges. He feels inexplicably nervous, like a teenager about to ask someone on a date for the first time, but he also feels how he feels when he's just about to get home after a long day, and he wonders how Donna can, after all these years and through all that they've been through, through all they're going through now, how she can still make him feel like a nervous kid and like he's about to come home all at once.

And then the line blinks open and he hears "Harvey."

"Donna." Her name rushes past his throat like a prayer.

"Are you okay?" He can hear her voice shake but he can also hear her summoning all of her strength and confidence in him.

"I'm hanging in," he answers. He doesn't see the point in filling her in on his days, on the monotony and the repetitiveness of prison. He's only two days in and he can see the repetitiveness stretch out over the next two years and it's deeply uninteresting. They both know too much of it anyway. "Warden seems like he has his head screwed on right. I'm keeping my head low. You?"

"I'll be okay. It's hard that you're not there. I'm working with Mike and Rachel."

He tries to ignore the unreasonable jealousy that pegs in his gut at the thought of Mike and Rachel and Donna working together without him. He should feel happy, he thinks; after all it's why he's in prison in the first place. It's exactly why he's done everything he did. He should feel victorious. After all, he won. They're out there free, and the firm is safe, and Donna wakes up every morning in her apartment and gets coffee on the way to work and can do whatever she wants and none of them are in prison uniforms waiting for meals and lights off and roll calls. He's won, and they've won along with him.

But it hurts.

Donna is Donna, and she can hear the conflict in his should through his silence. "We miss you," she says quietly. "It won't feel right until you're back with us."

"I know."

God, he misses her, misses her smile and her strength and the way she changes the atmosphere of the room when she walks in. He misses Mike and Rachel too, and Louis and Jessica, but Donna is different; she leaves a physical emptiness in him that he doesn't have the words for. He struggles with openness, and he doesn't know how to say what he thinks, so he falls silent, but his brain is working overtime. _I hope you know how I feel about you_ , he thinks. _I hope you know you're everything. I hope you know I will walk through every minute of these two years lightly if they bring me back to you. I hope you know I think of you when I wake up and when I go to sleep. I hope you know I did all of this for you. I hope you know I love you._

"Harvey."

"Yeah?"

"I know."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for continuing to come along on this story with me! Please leave a review if you liked it, have constructive feedback, or even if you hated it - reviews keep the momentum up for me to keep on with my first multi chapter! Thanks as always for being a generous and kind fandom x


	5. 5

He almost falls apart in the first few days.

Nothing makes sense or follows any rules he's ever learned, and he doesn't understand the complex set of unspoken laws that govern life behind concrete walls. He lies in his bunk, staring at the ceiling, anxiety punching a slow, consistent panic attack in his bones. He sits in it as it wearies his bones, punctuating his quiet vigil only with the things he's required by the guards to do - to eat and respond to his name being called and to shower. Sleep is elusive at first. He counts time in roll calls and meals and hair cuts. He stops shaving because it feels like it doesn't matter and he can feel himself slipping. He feels like if he's not careful, reality will depart from him all together, and one morning he realises that he simply can't afford to let this shit hole break him.

So he finds a pattern. He gets up alongside everyone else for roll call. He eats breakfast. He works out - it feels like a link to his old life and he supposes there's no harm in the other inmates seeing that the best closer in New York can also bench press his own weight and has a killer left jab. He meets the warden, and the warden doesn't trust him. He thinks Harvey is actively looking for a way to cut his sentence short. Harvey doesn't say out loud that he's right, but then who the fuck wouldn't want to shorten their sentence if they had the chance. So Harvey says the right things and doesn't try to charm him because he reads people and charm doesn't work on the warden, and he gets a job in the laundry room.

He works his shifts. When he finishes his shift he goes to the library and reads. He digs up old cases in the room off of the library put aside for study and self representation and studies them, tries to keep his skills honed and his mind sharp, even though he knows he's not a lawyer anymore. He writes letters - to Mike, to Marcus, to Donna. He tries to be positive in his words and doesn't tell anyone that he lies awake every night until the early hours.

He's mostly ignored by the other inmates, but he's not dumb enough to think that makes him anonymous. He feels the heat in every glance that's thrown his way, and he doesn't recognise any faces from his past cases, doesn't see anyone he's put away, but he knows he has a reputation, and it's not a helpful one to have in Cell Block D. Initially, he tries to meet some people, but he realises that he's known when people avoid conversation with him. Nobody wants to be seen to be getting cozy with one of the most notorious prosecutors in the recent history of New York law enforcement. He knows that anybody who does may as well paint the word 'snitch' across their forehead.

He can go days without speaking to anyone out loud. He's lonely, but he supposes that's better than being jumped in the yard.

And then, at some point, quite unexpectedly, it stops feeling impossible. It doesn't become easy, but he stops waking up with a start in the night, all nightmares and anxiety. He starts sleeping through the night until the lights in his cell crank open and he blinks awake with a grimace. He starts finding ways to live with the ache of loneliness without feeling like it's going to break him in half. He learns how to think about Mike and Donna and Rachel without feeling like he's going to have a heart attack.

Slowly, slowly, Harvey starts to feel like there's light sniping around the edges of the dark hole he's dug for himself. He has to crane his neck to see it, but it's there just the same. He is bored and sullen, but he feels like he's finding solid ground.

He starts to feel like he's going to make it through two years, until two things happen.

—

The first thing that happens is that Donna visits him.

It had taken a long time, longer than either of them had anticipated, to get Donna on the list of approved visitors. Donna couldn't tick the 'spouse' box or the 'fiancé' box, and there wasn't a 'together for a month but almost together for thirteen years' box.

She writes him, and he can see the frustration in the words she uses and in the pressure she's used to press the words into the paper. He sleeps with her letters under his pillow, and pretending she's with him is the only way he can find enough peace to sleep through the night until the lights crank on. He calls her whenever he can, and when he talks to Louis about his case, Louis always finds a way to tag her on to the end of the call. She's patient in the face of his restlessness and hopeful in the face of his pessimism, and even through the phone she can grab him and pull him from the dark to the light and she's so much better than him. And when she's finally approved and she secures a date to see him, she tells him when he calls and he can hear that the smile she's wearing reaches all the way to her eyes and he thinks his smile does the same.

And a week after she tells him on the phone, he's pacing in a small room, with his hands in his pockets and butterflies in his stomach like he's a fucking teenager.

In his head, being reunited with Donna has him grabbing her around the waist and pulling her against him in a kiss that covers every single second he's wanted to kiss her for the last two months. He'd replayed it over and over, imagining pushing his body against hers and tangling his hands through her hair and chasing his tongue over hers. He imagined packing every second with all the things he wanted to show her. He imagined pushing the rules for contact to their limit and finding a way to touch his hands to her, to find his way to bare skin, to feel her breath hitch against his.

In reality, she walks in the door, and she's more beautiful than he remembers, and her smile is the sunrise and her eyes promise everything and she's so overwhelming that he nearly has to sit down. So he just stands, weak and rooted to the spot because he doesn't trust gravity, and she walks into his space, hugs him, and he just drops his arms around her waist, sinks his face into the crook of her neck, and cries as all the tension and loneliness of the last two months escapes from where he's locked it in. He lets go of all the control he's forced into his frame to hold himself together and he feels the tension leave his shoulders. She's the only good thing he's touched in two months and he hadn't realised how little he's let himself miss her. He guesses it's a coping mechanism.

She kisses his temple, lets him feel everything he's feeling, murmurs, "Harvey," and runs her hand along his spine and he feels like he's free for a second.

He holds her until he feels like he can trust himself to stay standing again and pulls back to kiss her, and he feels like he should be embarrassed that his face is all tears and he tastes like salt but he doesn't care and neither does Donna and she kisses him back like… well, like she hasn't kissed him in months.

There's a whole conversation in their kiss; it's _I missed you_ and _I love you_ and _we're still us, we're still okay_ and multitudes of daily affirmations and declarations of commitment, and he can feel two months of her day to day in her top lip, he hears hundreds of conversations in the way her teeth tease over his lower lip, in the way she sucks gently, in the way her tongue touches out lightly. He forgets the metal and the fluorescent lighting and the locks and cameras, and it's just him and Donna, it's just them being.

She pulls back from him before they slide over the line that would make the guard hovering outside come in and separate them, and she bumps her forehead against his - nose to nose and fingers threading through his and she smiles at him like it's the best day of her life and goddammit if he doesn't deserve her in the slightest.

She runs a hand up over his jaw. "Look at you," she says, tickling his beard through her fingertips and sliding up to scratch his scalp through his freshly buzzed hair. She adjusts his collar with her other hand, unconsciously smoothing his shirt just like she always has before an important meeting.

"I know, I look old," he says, and it's half a joke but half an acknowledgement that the days are weighing on his face and in his shaving habits.

"You look like you," she says, and hooks her fingertips behind his jawline so she can pull his mouth to hers, and she kisses him again and it's slow and light and lingering, it's almost chaste, but he still feels the pull towards her and he has to work hard not to let his body react in a way that's inappropriate for a room full of cameras.

She breaks apart from him eventually, and she sits down so he does too, but she doesn't let go of his hand. She squeezes his palm, runs her other hand over his forearm, fingers tickling lightly, and Harvey lets his hand drop over her knee.

"How are you?" she asks.

Harvey fights the instinct to bottle everything away and to say he's fine. There's no point - Donna would see right through him like she always does and there's no point in protecting her, because the evasiveness in that would just make her worry. So he unpacks his days, his worries, his loneliness, and Donna rubs circles over his skin with his thumb and takes in everything he says without judgement and tells him everything's going to be okay and he believes her.

Donna tells him about outside - about the firm, and Jessica working hard to keep everything running, and that she thinks everything is going to be okay, that all the work they did is going to pay off. She tells him about the shows she's been to, and as she does he sees guilt slowly fall over her face, and she goes quiet halfway through her story.

Harvey squeezes her hand and says, "Donna, I'm here so you can do all these things. I want to hear about them." So Donna blinks back tears and takes a breath to steady herself and tells him about Louis trying to get her to go mudding with him, and then he laughs and so does she.

She tells him that Mike and Rachel are making wedding plans for when he gets out and it's that news that makes Harvey bump up against guilt because he's always dragging everyone he loves through the consequence of his bullshit and here he's done it again even though he's already in prison. He looks down at the floor, and Donna stops to tip his chin back to catch his gaze again. "Hey," she says. "They want you there."

"I don't want them to have to wait two more years to start their life together," he says.

"They live together and work together and spend almost every second together," Donna says. "They're doing fine. getting married is a celebration of where they already are, Harvey. You're not holding them back. Besides, if it was Mike in here and if it was us you know we'd wait to get married until he could come."

"Yeah, I know." Harvey realises a moment later what she's slipped into the conversation, feels a shadow of his usual cockiness twitch his eyebrow at her. "'If it was us'? Donna Paulsen, did you just propose to me?"

She feigns irritation. "Please, you think I'm going to hitch my wagon to a convicted conman who can't even be bothered shaving?"

He strokes a hand over his beard. "I thought you might find me ruggedly handsome."

"You're an idiot," she says, but she leans in and he kisses her lightly, and under the joke he still knows. He knows like he knows when he met her, and like he knew the other time, and like he knew every time a tiny insignificant moment happened and he got lost in her for a moment, and all those times that he knew it was unconscious because he was so busy pretending he and Donna aren't what they are.

And now he knows the same thing, but it's conscious and it's wonderful and terrifying because they've both yanked all their defences down, and he knows in the way she gets him coffee and bagels and in the way she makes fun of him to take his mind off the walls around him and in the letters she writes and in the hope in her voice.

Harvey is thinking about how he knows while he kisses her and it feels like the most natural thing to pull back just a little. "Just to clarify," he murmurs between kisses, "yes, I'll marry you."

Donna smiles into their kiss, murmurs, "Harvey," and he knows it's 'yes'. She drapes her arms around his neck, and of all the ways he thought he'd get engaged, getting engaged in a meeting room in prison without rings or plans was definitely not on the list, but he just told Donna he'd marry her and she said she'd marry him and in that moment he's not sure his heart could feel any fuller.

He doesn't know how he's going to wait two full years to tie his life to hers.

—

The second thing that happens is that Harvey gets stabbed.

—

The problem with being two months in and having just gotten engaged to the best person he knows is that Harvey has started to let his guard down. Monotony can't help but take a toll on him, he's started to fill in the world around him from memory, and he's not paying enough attention. He's not filing away faces and information like he was in his first days in Danbury. He's not watching his surroundings and he's not focussing sharply enough. It's not wise, but Harvey doesn't really notice that he's getting lazy, and it's understandable; no human body is designed to be on high alert all day every day.

And so, two months in, Harvey is having a shower and thinking about Donna and the unbelievable feeling of seeing her, of talking to her, of holding her. He's thinking about her smile and her touch and the relief that flooded through his frame when he was in the same room as her. He's thinking about her smile, about how she touched his hair and his face and about how she said his name but really said 'yes',, and he's thinking about her driving home and back to reality, what she would wear to work tomorrow, what conversations she would have, about how she would be holding the firm together without him. He's lost in thought, head under the water stream, thinking about how he misses her and about the next time he can see her and he's not thinking about four walls and guards and guns and it should have been a moment of calm and peace, but instead there's a noise behind him. He turns, and his body starts, his lungs grab onto a breath, and he feels the world around him lose focus.

"Frank," he says.

Frank Gallo is standing in front of him, inexplicably in a minimum security prison, and Harvey hasn't seen him in years but his face is the same as he remembers, ugly and shameless and devoid of mercy. He's with two other inmates, sleeves rolled up, and Harvey knows instinctively it's bad. There are no cameras, no guards, and, he suddenly realises, nobody else around him.

Frank smiles an ugly humourless smile, says,'hey Harvey, nice to see you,' and punches a flathead screwdriver through the side of Harvey's ribcage.

Like most people, Harvey has never spent much time considering what being stabbed would feel like, but if he'd been made to guess, he would have thought it would be a sharp, bright pain, that it would be immediately all consuming, that it would overwhelm him, that he would scream, that his world would narrow to the injury and he would go cold with shock. He would have guessed he'd panic and collapse, crying for help, and that his brain would scream with shock and he might pass out from the pain and trauma.

His best guess isn't even close.

It's not a rush of fear and panic. It feels deliberate, calculated, it almost feels like slow motion and he feels like he can feel time grinding to a halt. He feels the pressure of the tip of the screwdriver punching against his ribcage, hears the snap of the flathead breaking skin, the crack of ribs being shunted aside and he feels his insides shift around dull metal. It's not bright, it's not sharp, it's not blinding. It feels like he's in the ring and he's just taken a hook to the body that's just somehow gone straight through him and knocked the wind out of him.

He looks at Frank, feels a guttural breath punch out his lungs and it rattles on the way back in because his lung has been nicked and it's leaking air into his chest. Frank's smile is frozen on his face, and he says, 'I told you I'd get you one day, you fuck,' and yanks the screwdriver out. Harvey hears a sick crunching as Gallo pulls backwards, feels a damp warmth leak down his torso.

His hand goes to the puncture wound and he instinctively presses his palm against it. He reaches his other hand out, shaking fingers reaching against the stall to lean against it and steady himself as Gallo and his fellow inmates turn and leave him. Water and blood mix, ooze through his fingers; it's slow and thick and dark and he's only dimly aware of it slicking down his stomach. He presses in instinctively and feels ribs shift under his fingers and he guesses that's not normal and they're probably broken. He looks down to try and see what's happening but water is streaming over his head and face and blurring his vision.

His brain thinks, _huh_. He's observing himself with a strange detachment and he supposes that must be the shock setting in. He feels calm but he thinks it's probably more that he feels numb. The hand pressed against the stall is taking more and more of his weight and his fingers start to slip against the wet tile. It occurs to him he needs help. He opens his mouth, calls out, hopes someone is near and hears him.

He goes to take a step, to find a guard, and his legs go out from under him. He tries to turn his collapse into a controlled fall but he can't quite do it and he crumples, his back hitting the wet tile. He feels an inch of water at the back of his neck and the grate pressing into his skull.

His breath is coming in light quick gasps and he can't seem to pull air all the way into his diaphragm, it flutters in his throat and he's light tries hard to fill his lungs but he can hear air whistling into his chest instead and he knows his lung is collapsing. He looks over his heaving chest, sees a trail of blood flowing out from under his hand into the drain, says 'help' again, and the world blinks out to static.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Your continued support for this story is so appreciated. As always please leave a review - your feedback means I'm not shouting about Darvey into a void and it's so wonderful being part of such a supportive fandom.


	6. 6

The call comes through to Louis because Donna isn't his next of kin and Louis is listed as his attorney of record.

She gets a text from him and it only says _my office_ , and when Donna walks through his door he's still on the phone, asking questions and making the kind of ridiculous threats he makes when tension is snapping at him, and normally she finds it funny, but even though he didn't say in his text she knows instinctively when she enters that it's about Harvey, knows these are the threats he makes when shit has truly hit the fan, and she stands in mesmerised tension while he batters the person on the other end of the line.

And then he asks where Harvey is, asks what condition he's in, and it's not about how his mood is and how his mental health is faring because why would Louis ask that and why would Harvey tell, so it's about how he must be hurt, hurt badly enough that they needed to call, and her world suddenly stutters out into monochrome and the ringing of static, shades of grey and white noise because she supposes colour and sound take more focus than she can muster. Her hand falls on the chair in front of her for balance, her knees aren't stable, and that's been happening often, too often, and she knows in that moment she needs him home. She's always known it of course; wanting Harvey home has been a constant low hum in her belly in every second since he walked through barbed wire and didn't look back at her, and that's not special, because who doesn't have someone they love locked away and not want them home every second?

But this is different, it's not a want, it's not a desire, and it's not wishful thinking. It's a need, and not a need like _I need coffee_ or _I need help_ or even _I need you_. It's a need like oxygen, like the need to breathe after long seconds underwater, it's the need for water in the dry heavy heat, the need for daybreak after too long in the dark, the need for whatever it is you'll die without.

It's not about happiness but survival. Harvey is everywhere, in all of her past and present, he is oxygen, and she needs him _home_.

Louis' voice is not subtle, and Mike enters, then Rachel, and Rachel's hand lands on her shoulder and Mike guides her to sit down.

Louis breaks his phone when he slams the handset back on the receiver but Donna doesn't think he means to. Rachel kneels in front of her and says it's going to be okay, and Donna doesn't believe her because Rachel only knows she loves Harvey and not that he's oxygen.

Mike and Louis are trying to figure out their next move, and she hates that Harvey's freedom is a game to be played, hates the strategy under their words and the way they both turn their humanity off and turn Harvey's off too so they can dance around his case and the rights he does and doesn't have. They're talking about the law and not about the smile he's kept hidden away for years, the one that she's just discovered, the one he shows her shyly in the dark when she reaches to feel his cheek under her thumb, and they're talking about legislation and not the way his fingers unconsciously search hers out in the night when he's sleeping deep enough to dream, about behavioural codes and not about the way he leaves the last sip of wine in his glass for her. They're stripping him down to his number, to the words in his file, and she knows it's all to help him, to help her, but she can feel the hollow roll in her stomach because if that's how Mike and Louis can talk about him then how are the wardens and the guards and the inmates going to talk about him, like he's a criminal and a con and not like he's oxygen.

There are discussions and arguments and negotiations, but fuck it, she doesn't care, she just wants him home.

Then Louis mentions he's not at Danbury, he's at the Danbury hospital, and that snaps the world back into sharp relief in colour and in sound because that means two things. It means that he is hurt, really hurt, hurt enough that they had to move him from the prison to somewhere with the people and equipment to help him.

It means he's hurt, but it also means she can see him.

She has Ray's number pulled up on her phone before she has another coherent thought.

—

His hands are the first thing she notices when she walks into his room.

They're the same as she remembers them, knuckles cuffed and calloused from years of hooks and uppercuts, fingers that splay out slightly differently to any others she's held because he fractured them in the ring years ago and they didn't heal right, the patch of skin on the inside of his middle finger rubbed shiny and smooth by his heavy fountain pens because he still hates computers, that vein on the back of one hand punching even more brightly through pale skin, and she has a flash of memory from when he joked that he'd make a great junkie. They're still heavy against the blankets and they still promise strength and heft and she can feel them like ghosts under her chin and around her waist. They're the same. She's not sure why she expected different after just a day but they're the same.

Almost.

There's one wrist framed by the handcuff tethering him to the handrail of the bed frame, and that stings. She's only ever seen him cuffed with his hands behind him at the small of his back and it's easier that way, not having to see them out in the sunlight and screaming to her and everyone else that this man doesn't own his own breath or body or space. She thinks distantly that she hates that because the first thing that there is now is always a reminder of what he's done instead of who he is, the first thing is always something that pushes his frailty and not his goodness to the surface for everyone else to see, and it's been her job for so long to push his strength out into the world and to hide his brittleness and it's all undone now. She thinks unbidden about what the doctors must think about him and if they quietly resent the resources hurled at him to save his life and not someone else, some hypothetical someone who deserves his bed more because they got hit by a car saving an old lady but couldn't afford health insurance. Most people get to hide the worst of themselves behind silence and secrets and lies, behind deleted emails and calls they hang up on and words they speak out to empty rooms. Most people get to make sure the best of themselves is what's on the surface. Harvey doesn't, not anymore, and she knows he's not perfect, knows it more than anyone other than maybe Harvey himself, but it's unfair that handcuffs tell everyone so much and so little all at once. They tell everyone he cheated the system but not that he loves her with a clarity that feels like stepping into sunlight, that he lied to his friends but not that he threw himself into the void for them, that he broke the law but not that he snatched a kid out from a life sentence of drug abuse and a future of looking over his shoulder and running, always running.

His eyes are closed and if it wasn't for the beeping of machines and the drainage tube she can see snaking from a fresh, angry, too wide and too long scar curving along the side of his chest and around to his back, and another scar trailing down from just below his sternum, disappearing under the blanket at his waist

_good god, Harvey_

she would have sworn he was just asleep. She doesn't know if he's sleeping, sleeping the way humans are meant to sleep, just sleeping, just dreaming, or if he's unconscious or if it's morphine induced. She suspects he's probably somewhere in between all three. He's pale, his complexion blasted white under his tan, the metal surgical staples catching the fluorescent of the lights above him as they chase train tracks down his stomach and side, and his eyes are rimmed with an exhausted black that sits so deep under his skin that she thinks for a moment that he's been beaten. He's lost weight inside prison and when she saw him yesterday he looked trim, but now he just looks thin and raw and hungry and it draws his cheeks up in thin sunken lines, his jawline isn't strong as much as it is sharp, the muscles in his jaw framed and slack under the weight of his paper thin skin and of the oxygen mask pushing air into his lungs. Even through his sleep or unconsciousness she can feel the ragged weariness that's punched through him and flattened his muscles, making him look smaller than she's ever known him, and the nights she's spent with her hand on his back thinking about the strength sitting under his skin feel like a lie, feel like a world away and he's just human and frail and far more mortal than she's ever realised. She's no doctor but she is Donna and she doesn't need to be able to read a chart to know how close it got, she knows him and she can read it in his sallowness and she can feel the fight he's fought against the long alarm, she knows instinctively how very nearly doctors called a time out over his body. It was close, the call to Louis was almost arrangements and not information, was almost 'I'm so sorry' and 'we did all we could' and he nearly went, nearly left.

But he's breathing.

He looks fucking awful, but he's breathing.

She still has oxygen.

She sits, and waits, and covers his hand with hers, threads her knuckles in between his and he's colder than he should be but he's alive and in the silence she swears she feels him squeeze her fingers and she rubs circles in his skin for hours.

It's only her bad timing that has her on the phone outside his door, saying "Oh my god, Louis, you have to get him out of there," and Louis saying the words 'Frank Gallo', which makes her blood run cold, but Louis also says he has a plan and that he's going to see Cahill when Harvey wakes up on his own.

—

There isn't anyone there when he wakes up and so he's confused because there's always been a guard nearby or before that there was Donna in his bed, and he doesn't wake up with the industrial cranking of artificial lights so he's not in Danbury, but he also doesn't wake up with a hand on his ribs in the slow bleed of dawn or her shifting against the alarm ringing them awake before the sun can get to them, so he's not at home and he's not with her.

There's something on his face which isn't normal and so his first instinct is to push it away, but he can't move his hand to brush whatever it is aside and that's not normal either. So he opens his eyes and there's a bright line above him, he blinks and it takes a second to resolve itself into the hollow tubing of a fluorescent light and around it is the squared tiling of a low ceiling and he wonders what he's doing waking up the office hallway and surely he can't have had a panic attack so bad that he passed out because he hasn't had a panic attack in months. There's something wrong with his hearing so maybe it was a panic attack, so he tries to call out for Donna, for Mike, for Jessica, but his throat isn't working and whatever is on his face is huffing his breath into a muffled gurgle. There's beeping next to him and maybe he dropped his phone and there's a phone call coming through or an alarm he forgot he set.

He starts to lift his head, and his eyes come into focus, and he sees.

He sees an unfamiliar door and room washed white and heady with disinfectant. He sees the kind of chairs you only see in waiting rooms but he doesn't know what he's meant to be waiting for. He sees himself, prone, which he expected, under a white blanket, which he didn't, and he's not wearing a suit, not even a shirt and he didn't expect that either, and there's enough that he's seeing that isn't right that he can feel his breath starting to catch in his throat and his ears start to ring. He has one hand he's figured out he can move and he puts it to his face and there's something covering his nose and mouth so he pulls at it but just as his brain supplies the word 'mask' he sees two lines of staples holding his body together and then it suddenly doesn't matter that there's something over his nose and mouth because he can't breathe anyway.

Hands shaking, he pushes at the sheet, his body tense with panic and the phantom pain that hides behind morphine. He pulls the sheet aside with the blanket, sees the bright pink scars snaking along the curve of his lung and down his abdomen, and if he hadn't been locked in the spiral of fight or flight he probably would have been able to shrug it off, it's just scars and he's collected more than one through years in the ring and in the batting cages, but they're _huge_ which means something bad has happened. The other problem is that for the life of him he can't remember what it is that's happened and the not remembering makes him think that something else is wrong, more than just scars and stitches; it feels like mortality pounding down his door, and his mind spirals. His breath is firing in machine gun blasts and the mask over his mouth and nose is smothering him and it feels like no real oxygen is reaching his lungs. Sweat spikes in a damp sheen on his forehead and he feels the sudden flush of bright cool creeping on his skin. A hundred scenarios are fighting for his attention and he's never been one for what-ifs but they're coming thick and fast and he feels like his nervous system is about to short circuit. The maybes of bleeding out or of brain damage or of a gap where a lung or spleen used to be don't feel like maybes, they feel like certainties, and he hears in the distance the beeping of his monitor screaming out the frantic patter of his heartbeat. The metal of handcuffs rattles against his bed frame and that's why he can't move one hand and he's not sure if he's trying to pull his hand free or if his whole body is shaking and _Jesus Christ I can't do this_

And then Donna is there. She lays her hand over his, stopping his scrambling fingers with a firm reassurance, and says, "hey. Breathe." Her other hand goes to his shoulder, her palm steady against his collarbone, and she presses lightly, guides him back against the mattress, and she's not strong, certainly not stronger than him, but there's something in her touch that won't take no for an answer and his body complies with her. His head drops back to the pillows and she sounds like she's in a tunnel a million miles away from him, but her skin is warm and real and alive and she's talking him through it and as she murmurs to him the world starts to slow down. She shifts her hand to his face, adjusting his mask, and it's still claustrophobic but she soothes her hand across his cheek and that's enough. She keeps talking, and her hand goes to his chest, feeling it rise and fall, and it's almost like she's willing it to relax under her fingers, willing his heart to find a normal rhythm, and slowly, slowly, he returns to her.

He finally blows a long breath out from pursed lips and he feels the pounding in his ears slide away and he reminds himself that he's okay and even if he isn't he's in a hospital and she's with him so he's as okay as he can be. He feels like shit and it looks like he's been broken in half and stapled together like Frankenstein's fucking monster, he can't remember anything that's happened and he doesn't know exactly where he is or even if he'll recover from whatever it is that he can't remember, but she is here and she is gravity stopping him from spiralling into the atmosphere again and he's okay.

—

The only benefit of having a panic attack when you're hooked up to a heart monitor is that it certainly gets the attention of the hospital staff and the doctor and nurses that arrive to fuss over him and check lines and look sideways at his handcuffs help he and Donna fill in the blanks. Donna knows more than she's saying, he can see it in the lines behind her eyes, but that can be later, later when they are just them on their own again. They tell him he was attacked and he was found by another inmate who raised the alarm, and that he'd crashed in the prison infirmary and Donna flinches at that and Harvey tries to hide the sudden dryness in his throat. They'd gotten him back, just, and the hospital was close enough to get him to emergency surgery before it was too late for anything but a body bag, which the doctor doesn't say out loud, but Harvey isn't an idiot and he knows, and he feels Donna's fingers go tight around his so she knows too.

In any other scenario the place where he'd gotten stabbed would have been a point of concern, but in contrast with the two train lines mapping his torso, the screwdriver puncture looks almost comically small now, a tiny pucker with a single stitch on the side of his ribcage. The doctor is explaining the damage to his lung that required the emergency surgery that snaked the first incision from the side of his ribcage and swept under his armpit to his back, and the puncture wound was low enough that they also needed to do the exploratory surgery that is routine with any abdominal injury and that's how he got the line down his stomach that makes him look like a fucking elementary school biology project. But he's less worried about looking like a science experiment than he is about if he's okay and he asks questions he never thought he'd have to ask, about how his organs are doing, about when he can leave and if he can walk and if his spine is okay and did he have any brain damage from his head hitting the tile because he gained a few stitches there as well, and he suddenly realises that this is too much, way too much and he doesn't think he can handle it, but there are doctors and he tries to push that thought away.

It kills him, kills him to be the one asking questions instead of answering them. Kills him to hear the shake in his voice and the way he has to clear his throat because it's dry and everything is coming out sounding like a scratch across a chalkboard. Donna is right there and she'll know that his stomach is churning and his heart is pounding, she'll hear it in his voice and in the way the handcuffs rattle against the hospital bed because his hands are shaking even though he's got them pressed against the blankets so hard his fingertips are turning white, and in the tilt of his head because it's his biggest tell and he's never been able to control it. He knows he shouldn't be trying to hide himself from her, even though she can see through him like he's tissue paper, but it's second nature to him still after so many years and he hasn't got it in him to be the person she thinks he is while he's trying to force panic back down his throat and trying not to think about the way he can feel the scars creeping across his torso like scarlet letters for his sins.

Donna shatters any illusion that he was managing to keep his panic from her, because as soon as the doctor and nurses leave the room she turns to him and says, "don't hide from me, Harvey."

"Donna -"

"Harvey," she interrupts, and it's gentle, but there's steel in her voice. "Don't tell me you're okay or that you're fine. We aren't that anymore. You don't get to hide things from me because you're uncomfortable. This isn't some small fight or some deal you lost. You can't shrug this off, and you can't pretend your first panic attack in months doesn't mean something."

"You knew about those."

"I did. I wanted to talk to you about them when you're ready. And I still do. And if you're not ready to talk yet, Harvey, it's okay. It really is." She fixes him with a look that goes right through him. "But don't you dare lie to me. Don't hide. You don't have to say anything as long as you don't hide."

He is gold wrapped around glass - a paper thin veneer of something valuable and flexible hiding the core of him which is breakable, brittle and completely transparent.

All he can think about is how much he doesn't have anything close to what he needs to be who she deserves. He thinks he should talk about it, but one of the things he doesn't have yet is whatever he needs to be able to talk about it, maybe it's courage or maybe it's honesty or maybe it's self reflection, he doesn't know. He just knows he's facing a mountain and he's falling, he's failing and she's trying to shove him back up it, and he doesn't know if he can. Maybe he has it in him to be who she needs him to be, but maybe pushing his heart and soul further than he has already will finish him off all together so all he thinks is _jesus I'm a fucking mess_ and it hurts to breathe and the shifting of his lungs feels like sandpaper under his skin and he swears he can feel the stitches against his bones.

She sees it, sees him grasping and she grabs him, grabs his hand, but she grabs his spirit along with it, shakes him back to himself with a squeeze of her fingers and how does she always manage to do that. One day he thinks he's going to need to become a man who doesn't need to be rescued from himself by her all the time.

He remembers, then, how he fell asleep on top of her, late in the night, after they both gasped each others names into the dark, and that was years ago, years before Mike and playing in the grey and Gibbs and deals. They'd walked out of the DA's office and into each other and he'd fallen asleep with his arm over her stomach and his head turned into her neck and hair and when he woke up the next morning with the tip of his nose against her collarbone that's when he knew, knew _I'm in trouble and it's you_ , because he'd never ever slept with anyone like that. He always had to move, to settle on his side of the bed, maybe with a leg or hand touching, but he was never comfortable sleeping so close in someone else's space, it felt like too much, too intimate, much more intimate than burying his fingers or tongue or cock inside someone, and he couldn't be that for anyone, he just wasn't that guy. But with her he hadn't even thought about it, hadn't even made the decision to stay hovered against her skin and her breath, he'd just fallen asleep in her orbit like being that close in on her was the most natural thing in the world, like it's how he was built to be and he was just home.

He hadn't known exactly what she was then, just that she was whip-smart and kind and imbued with the kind of clairvoyance he'd always thought he didn't believe in, and that she was all legs and neck and the stuff his teenage fantasies were built from. He hadn't known that she was salvation itself, and god he wants to be worthy of it.

Worthy right now, he thinks, is getting through this, making the two years something they both survive. He's taut with his own flaws, with the way he doesn't want to talk to her about how he feels and the way he wants to hide from her and everyone, with the way he wants to push her away and lie to her and even fight with her just so he has a reason to be angry instead of fucking petrified.

But worthy, he's realising, isn't hiding away and becoming perfection and then revealing yourself to everyone. It's not big gestures and declarations and it's not flowers and limos and Hermès bags. Donna never took the flowers and the limos and the bags because she wanted them, she took them because she wanted him and because she knew that there was a part of him trying so hard to say _I'm in trouble and it's you_ and bags and limos was the best he could do. But she doesn't want the flowers, she doesn't want the limos, she doesn't want the bags, she didn't grow up rich and she doesn't give a shit about any of that and she doesn't want him in the way he wants to be seen, she doesn't want him the way he thinks she wants him. She doesn't want the best closer in New York or Superman or whatever he feels like he should be poured into a Tom Ford suit.

She just wants him, all of him, the him of his panic attacks and anxiety and confusion as well as the him of his sharp mind and tenacity and flashes of brilliance. She wants him in all of himself, taut and glass covered over with gold, wants his fear alongside his courage, wants his panic alongside his confidence, wants his brittle bones and his temper and his weariness.

Worthy isn't in his perfection. Even if he could find perfection it isn't there. Worthy is somewhere in his weakness, and that thought feels like a revelation, maybe the first he's ever really had, and he wonders if that's how Donna feels every time she looks at him sideways and says the exact right thing and knows him better than he does.

So, he says, "I'm scared, Donna," and she nods, and says "I know."

"I don't know what we're going to do."

"I know." She squeezes his hand and says with something akin to the faith of the saints, "but you'll figure it out."

"How do you know that?"

"Because I know."

From Donna, that is all the explanation he needs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Sorry for the delay on this one, guys! I tried to write a plot and exposition heavy chapter, and then realised nobody cares about that, including me, and that I just wanted to explore our two wonderful idiots, so I did that instead.
> 
> Special thanks to Zivitz and Sapphicsrlit, who gave me excellent sounding boards and feedback when I was trying to crack this one.
> 
> As always, your reviews area greatly appreciated and keep the motivation high to keep working on this! Thanks for the privilege it is to be a part of the Suits fandom, it brings joy in this super weird time.


	7. 7

Having major surgery that requires a six week recovery is goddamn awful.

As usual, everyone he knew moved mountains for him. Jessica had quietly rented an apartment in Danbury, on Liberty Street near the city centre, and put a local driver on retainer, and told Donna that she wasn't needed in the office for the next six to eight weeks and she was free to spend the time how she wished while she dropped a key and a note with the address on it into her hand. Donna had looked at Jessica with a look in between shock and thankfulness, she'd told him, and Jessica had just nodded at her, that nod Jessica has where she has already seen the endgame and is quietly and confidently working her way towards it. Jessica had pegged Donna before she'd even met her, had noted the way Harvey had talked about her like he hadn't talked about anyone, had seen the something in him that leant towards her like she was the thing he didn't yet know he was missing, because she was and because he didn't. So she just said, "Harvey is lucky he has you," and went back to her office to prepare for a meeting.

Rachel had dropped a packed bag at Donna's desk and had said she'd organised for some more clothes to be sent up in the next day or so. She'd squeezed Donna's hand, said that she had been in touch with the local restaurants and had organised deliveries for the next five nights and could add more on if she hadn't been able to get the lay of the city by then. Donna's voice had cracked, just a little, when she'd told Harvey, and Harvey had laid his hand on her arm and made a mental note that Rachel would always have him in her back pocket.

Louis had dropped the rest of his cases to focus on Gallo and on finding something to stop Harvey having to go back in while Frank still stalked the halls. He brought back Katrina, who immediately picked up all of Louis' work and a fair amount of Harvey's. And Louis had begged Harvey to come forward, to name Gallo, to lay charges. They had a case, not a home run, but a good one, and Harvey knew it. No witnesses, and no footage, but they had Harvey's history with Gallo, and Gallo hadn't exactly distinguished himself at Danbury as a model prisoner and if he came forward, Louis said, they stood a good chance of winning and not only getting Frank moved, but getting him moved to max security, and with another twenty to thirty years tagged on for good measure. It was the right thing to do, and probably the smart thing to do.

But he couldn't do it. He couldn't risk it, risk himself, not when he finally had her, finally had somewhere in the world that was peace. If that meant keeping his head down, keeping to himself and his cell, requesting a transfer to another block, and letting Gallo get away with one of the less shocking things he'd ever done, then so be it.

So Harvey refused.

 _Fucking coward_. He saw it in Louis' eyes, but he didn't need to - he thought it about himself plenty without needing to see Louis burying the same idea behind a curt nod and the assurance they'd think of something else. Harvey thought darkly that the only useful thing he'd done since hurling himself onto the grenade in Gibbs' office was get cut in half by a bunch of doctors because at least that had bought Louis a few weeks to think of something else.

And Mike. Mike he needed to keep his eye on. Mike had gone quiet, which only ever meant he was up to something calculated and dangerous and Harvey couldn't risk Mike being calculated and dangerous if it meant something might happen to Donna. Mike's heart and his brain were too fast for each other and he chased himself down dead ends and what-ifs and maybes like God himself was running from him. Harvey had always admired that about him, that single mindedness he could turn on any situation, dogged to the point of obsession, it was _this_ and not this and it was exactly the kind of risk that spiked his adrenaline and his blood pressure just enough to make the grey area they play in spark to full colour and he almost always loved him for it.

Except when it came to Donna. Donna was forever pulling him back from the abyss that Mike and Harvey flirted with, and usually those two tensions didn't spill over and collide, and he loved them both and he'd lie down on train tracks for either one of them again and again, but if it came to it, if it came down to just Donna or just Mike, he'd pick Donna and not even think twice about it. And so, he watched Mike, and loved him, and hoped he wouldn't have to choose Donna without even thinking twice about it.

Once again Harvey watched his friends and his family pile time and money and help upon him, time and money and help that he didn't deserve and certainly hadn't earned, and all to save him - to save him from his own hubris and from the consequences that came with him finally taking responsibility for dragging them all into the firing line with him. Harvey hates it, swinging between gratitude and guilt, and he'd thought at least that going to prison would wash some of that from him, but it hasn't, and now he's lying in a bed willing the two halves of his body to stitch themselves back together and with nothing to do but wait until he can have another hit of morphine and think about all the guilt and anger and gratitude and helplessness fighting for attention in his messed up fucking head. It's been a constant the last several days that he's been here and he's tried to occupy himself by tugging grumpily at his handcuffs and his IV like a teenager, but it doesn't help. There's not enough distraction for him. For the first time in so long that he doesn't even know, there's no case or crisis to think about, no puzzle to solve, no rock and hard place to find a miraculous way out from. Even in prison there were guards to befriend and rules to outsmart and prisoners to intimidate.

But not here. It's just him and his thoughts, and what those thoughts do to his guts, and he's just now realising that he doesn't get up to go to the gym by 5:30 and to work by 7, and then the bar and the jazz club after, and fall into bed exhausted at 1am because he's driven and competitive, but because the buzz of the world around him is therapy. New York he loves because it's loud and violent and demands attention and it's the white noise that blocks out a lifetime of heartache and longing, of broken decisions trailing one after the other. Hospitals, on the other hand, are quiet and have a way of pausing time altogether, so now it's just him in hours that stretch out far longer than they do in the village or in Soho, and it's just him and his frayed nerve endings shifting under stitched skin, just him and his nervous system soaking in every shitty thing he's ever done that he hasn't thought about for years or ever, people he's lied to and women he's fucked who's names he can't remember, clients he's pitted against each other and cases he's let turn into personal vendettas, and everything else in 45 years that he hasn't absorbed and admitted to because he had worked so hard to be someone who didn't have the energy to think about himself when his head hits the pillow at night.

Feelings goddamn suck, he decides.

"You're having a hard day."

He looks up, his mind snapping back to the present, and sees Donna closing the door behind her.

The only good thing about having major surgery that requires a six week recovery is that he gets to see her, and as he looks up he swears his sternum pushes against his stitches and his lung hooks up against bruised ribs and he's way, way too old to look up and see Donna and have his breath catch in his throat like that but it still does, just like it always has, but in a way that he can admit now, and it hurts, and he doesn't care.

"I'm okay," he says, and wonders if it sounds as unconvincing outside his head as it does inside.

"Is that right," she says, and she's not bought it at all, and he thinks _well shit_.

"I'm as okay as I can be for someone who got cut in half a couple of days ago," he says, and he feels both smug and guilty that he thinks he might be able to swing sympathy into avoiding whatever it is she's going to want to talk about. He shouldn't be trying to manipulate the deep vein of compassion she has for him and inexplicably never seems to run out of so that he can avoid her, and he's learning, but he's not there yet. Old habits die hard, especially when he's already spent hours today chasing his brain down a rabbit hole, a history of bullshit decisions and choices, and his sense of self preservation is screaming into overdrive. Manipulation and empathy are techniques he stretches into automatically, like shrugging into the right stance in front of the heavy bag at the gym. It's one of the more shitty things he does, manipulating people who care about him.

He isn't sure if he wants it to work or not.

It doesn't work, because of course it doesn't. She settles into the chair next to his bed, takes his hand, turns towards him and looks him in the eye with that specific wide-eyed clarity she gets when she's decided to be the kind of loyal hard ass who is going to bully him into letting her love him. "You were a million miles away. What's up?"

He still struggles to look her in the eye, when it's like this. Honesty is always hard anyway, because Harvey makes his trade in bending himself into what he needs to be at the cost of who he is, and everyone does that a little, but he's been doing it so long and so thoroughly that it's second nature now, even when it's just him and her, and he knows that. He'd said it to Paula, said _I just keep turning myself inside out for everything_ and then stuttered into silence because it had felt so big to say it and so heavy, and too much of a truth to lay out into the oxygen around him. Paula had called it a 'breakthrough', and that was all well and good but knowing that doesn't make it easier. And now he's raw and exhausted and sore in a way that aches his skin, bright metal spiking in from the outside and broken bones pushing against on the inside, and morphine helps but can't get right to the edges of it. All he wants to do is lie to her. All he wants to do is to tell her everything. All he wants to do is fight, and surrender, and leave, and sleep, and push her away and never let her go.

Feelings goddamn suck.

"Harvey. Talk to me." She's not asking a question, not really. Her eyes are clear and deep and he can see she already knows exactly what's going on.

if it was Mike, he'd have had to explain. But it's Donna, so he doesn't. She knows. She's always just known. He almost wants to push that at her like an accusation. _You should know. I shouldn't have to say._

But he remembers her, years ago, rolling her eyes at him when he tried to use the same reasoning with her when Melanie had split things off with him for the final time, back at the DA's office. Donna had gotten into work and come into his office to drop his messages off, taken one look at him, and had said,

—

what happened.

Nothing happened, he'd said, and he hadn't looked up from his paperwork because he could already tell in her voice she knew that something _had_ happened and she probably knew exactly what that something was, and if he met her gaze with his own she'd read her suspicions in the way his left eyebrow was slightly more arched than his right or because he was wearing a grey suit instead of a blue one or that he'd blinked more slowly than normal or some psychic shit like that. So he shuffled the paper in front of him back into its folder and and waited, and Donna waited him out because she'd always been much more patient and somehow more stubborn than him, and when he'd finally looked up at her from underneath his eyebrows she had her head cocked to the side and arms crossed the way she did when he was about to have his feelings explained to him.

What, he'd snapped. He snaps at her when he wants her to drop it. She'd rolled her eyes at him and she'd always been the only person he couldn't intimidate out of his presence with that voice, and it still annoys him.

You didn't talk to her about what's happening at work, did you, Donna had said.

Yes, he'd said, and he could hear the sulk sitting under his throat, and he'd thought, _Christ what a baby._

She'd waited.

Okay, I didn't. But she's a lawyer too and she knows I'm dealing with a huge case. She should have just gotten it. He'd shrugged. You always do, he'd added.

It's not about getting it, it's about talking about it, she'd pointed out.

What does that even mean, Donna.

It means relationships aren't just about getting someone and expecting them to get you. This isn't about information, Harvey. It's about connection. She doesn't want to know what's happened. She wants to know how you feel.

You know how I feel.

I'm Donna, I know everything. And if I was with you -

\- you are with me.

\- you know what I mean. _With you_ with you. If I was with you I would still want you to talk about how you felt even if I already knew.

Why?

God Harvey, you're such an idiot.

She'd thrown her arms up, and he'd tucked a smile away at that. She knew, he'd thought. She'd always known, knew instinctively when he was trying to get a rise out of her. He was the only person she let under her skin. There was something to that, he'd thought, in the evenings and away from the office when it was okay to think about secret things like that. He hid it, folded it away during the day, when thinking of himself under her skin was dangerous and close, too close to something far beyond the kind of relationship that bosses had with their secretaries. He was never sure if it was safe, him getting under her skin and her letting him. He didn't think it was, but Donna was smarter than him, safer than him, and she'd always played along. He liked that about Donna. Maybe he loved it, he could never tell the difference with her.

He didn't figure it out until years later that he'd already crossed the line between like and love years ago and that's why it was always hard to tell.

But she had crossed that line too, and that's why _you're an idiot_ always sounded like _I love you_ and it's also why he could never figure out why he liked goading her into calling him an idiot so much.

And she'd said, just … talk, Harvey. Tell her how you feel. She'll probably know. But she wants to hear it. You're not anywhere near as hard as you pretend to be. Let her in. It'll be worth it.

Why.

Because you're worth it, Harvey.

He'd looked up in surprise and she was looking at him with something deep and different and unknowable in her eyes. It was unexpected and soft and it had felt like something for a second, something dangerous and beautiful and … something.

Okay, he'd said slowly, and he hadn't blinked and there was something suddenly tight in his chest. I'll tell her how I'm feeling.

The _her_ had sounded like _you_.

—

"Harvey."

He blinks. "Yeah."

"Where'd you just go?"

"I've just been thinking."

She smoothes her thumb over his knuckle. "About what?"

"Everything. Fucking hospital."

She smiles and hums her agreement quietly, but she's also not buying his humour, not letting him wave off his emotions with jokes and dismissiveness and she waits, lays her other hand against his jawline, tickling his beard through her fingertips.

He sighs.

"I guess I've been thinking about how I got here. I know it's because of Mike and lying about his being a lawyer, but really? I'm thinking about how this goes back way longer. I've been lying for too long, Donna." He didn't say that he thinks it's actually been since he walked in on his mom, and she asked him to lie, and he did, and he thinks he just never stopped. "It's too easy. I want to lie to you right now. I want to tell you everything's fine and I'm fine and make a joke about Top Gun and I just want you to leave me alone."

She waits, maybe she's trying to decide if she should be hurt by that revelation or not, then says, "you don't have to say anything you don't want to."

He hears _but don't you dare hide from me_ again in the unspoken gap after her words, and he wants to tell her, wants to tell her everything, but when he opens his mouth the words won't come out and he doesn't know if that's because he's trying to find the right ones or because he's never said anything like the kind of truth she's asking for out loud before or because he's just terrified. There are sentences and words and apologies that skim his brain without making it past his throat, but it's only silence that happens and he thinks _say it just say it you fucking coward_

"Harvey."

"I'm scared," he says, and it rattles past his vocal chords in a rush like he's chasing redemption. He's terrified, of honesty, of unbolting the thoughts that tie him up in knots, he's tired of his own bullshit and scared of what Donna will think when she sees how cracked and brittle he is, because how does he say that there's a part of him that hides away a creeping certainty that he deserves the scars and the slashes and the pain and the stitches, because the guilt of his decisions is weighing on his chest and splitting him into two people as much on the inside as the surgeons have on the outside, and this way at least there's something on his skin that matches what's happening in his soul, and maybe this is penance.

Donna lets his silence stretch out too long, and she says, "we can drop it Harvey, if you're not ready."

He doesn't want to drop it, but he doesn't know how to unfold everything either. So instead, he says, "I've never had a beard."

She blinks, and her hand goes automatically from his jaw to his cheek, her thumb rubbing over his cheekbone. She's confused, he can see her brain trying to slot this confession into something she knows of him that makes sense, but she waits for him to speak again. He doesn't share, never shares things like this, and it feels like she doesn't want to break the moment.

Harvey feels himself suck in a breath against protesting lungs and continues, because he's started now so it's not so much about courage as it is that his words are creating their own momentum. "My dad had a beard. And Bobby had a beard. And everyone else my mom ever fu- ever slept with had a beard." He can't quite bring himself to match his gaze with Donna's, but he hopes it's enough. "She likes beards, she told me once when mine started to come through. Said it made me handsome. Said it would make girls chase me. And … and I didn't want to be anywhere near anything that was what she liked about men." His breath rags out on the last word and he goes quiet, and he's just told her a story that doesn't mean anything, not really, but it's also everything and at the core of what makes him fall into bed at 1am exhausted or with some girl he can forget about the next day so that he doesn't have to think about honesty and love and what faithful means.

In the quiet, he thinks for a moment, and then he looks at her. "I've never told anyone that."

She leans forward and kisses him then, her mouth pushing over his and both hands on his cheeks, and his hands go automatically to her face as well, and he can feel the depth of her in the way her jaw moves against his palms. He tastes salt and it's tears and he's not sure if that's her or him but it doesn't matter because maybe it's both of them. It's far from chaste but it's not wonton either, it's a whole different kind of passion that he doesn't think he's ever felt from a kiss before, it's devotion and tenderness and desperation all at once and it feels like love and _thank you_ and healing.

He pulls back first, because his lungs are fire, and he lets his forehead press against hers, and he doesn't open his eyes because he thinks seeing whatever's in hers would finish him off.

"Harvey," she says, and he doesn't think he's heard her say his name quite that way before. "What makes you different isn't this," she says, her fingers running through his beard. "It's this."

He feels her hand lay gently against his chest.

That hurts, hurts because it crashes up against everything he tells himself, and he tries to turn his head away, old defences slamming back into place, but she won't let him, she stops him with her hand in his beard and on his jaw and draws his forehead back against hers. "You have a good soul, Harvey," she says, and it's fierce on her whisper and honest, way more open and overt than how they ever talk, they don't talk like this, but he's about to run and he can feel it and he knows she can too.

"I'm no better in there," he says.

"You are -"

"I had panic attacks when you left," he interrupts. There's something in him that hates it, hates forgiveness, hates grace, and he needs her to see how deep it goes, how ruined he is, how fucked he makes everything and everyone around him. "They started when you went to work for Louis. And instead of talking to you about it I lied to you and I hurt you and I tried to manipulate you into coming back." He swallows, and _what does that say about my soul_ he thinks, but he can't make himself say it.

"I also know Jessica offered to force me back and you said no," she says, and her voice is clear and even, and there's no judgement or fear in it.

"How do you know about that?"

"Because I know. Do you think I wasn't watching out for you every step of the way, Harvey? Loving you isn't something I can turn off. Even when you're being an asshole."

He laughs, and it shifts the heaviest of his bitter self recrimination off his chest, and that catches him off guard, how she can push lightness into him with a word.

"I know you can turn your humanity off, Harvey," she says. "But that's something you've learned to do. It's not who you are."

"How do you know that?" he says again.

She shakes her head a little at him; it's her 'you're being an idiot' head shake. "Because you're here," she says, and gently lays her hand on his sternum, just where the staples begin, just where he's been cut open and stitched back together and his lungs shatter out because that's uncomfortably close to what he suspects she's doing to him right now, but her hand is warm and light and it's human and he thinks it might also be what makes him human. "You're in the hospital. You're in _prison_ , Harvey. You're here because you didn't want Mike to be here. You didn't want any of us to be here. So you're here."

And she nudges his chin so that he opens his eyes, and she grabs his gaze with hers, and he knows, he knows that she needs him to hear this. "Anytime you've been backed up against it Harvey, really backed up against it, you've chosen the right thing. Every time. I've seen it."

He swallows, and he wants to protest, but he doesn't, and he's not sure if it's because he's tired or because he believes her but it might be both.

"Don't punish yourself," she says. "It's enough. This is enough. You're here because you fell on your sword for all of us. Whoever you think you are? That person would never have done that. But here you are. Because you're _good_ , Harvey. You're a good man."

And she kisses him again, maybe because she's scared he'll protest, and maybe because she knows how far away they've gotten from how they normally are. Even together, they're mostly glances and silences, mostly metaphors and hypotheticals and _you just get me_. This is them out loud and open and it's close to glorious but it's terrifying, and so she kisses him and he can feel how scared she is too, scared that she's throwing _you just get me_ aside to be _this is the me you need to get_ and there's nothing wrong with _you just get me_ , but Harvey is digging, finally digging, and she's going with him.

When she pulls back, she murmurs against his lips, says, "hey. One day soon, this is going to be over. And we are going to build a life together, and it's going to be worth it Harvey, I promise." And then she opens her eyes to his, and she looks into him and smiles and it's watery but it's also sunlight. "Now stop moping. Insight is good Harvey, but you're being fucking depressing."

A laugh punches out from his lungs and it's so unexpected that he's pretty sure one of his ribs shifts back out of place but he's with someone who can break dawn from night with a single sentence and that's just about all he could ever hope for. He tangles his hands into her hair and bumps his forehead against hers and kisses her through tears and through laughter until his chest burns, and he thinks if this is what relationships are, if they're messy and hard and involve tearing yourself open to let someone see all of you and help you be different, be something akin to better, then he's glad it's her.

—

"Where did this come from?"

"Where did what come from?"

"All this openness and insight."

"Oh. I was thinking about at the DA's office when you yelled at me about Melanie." There's a twinkle there.

"Well if you weren't such an idiot I wouldn't have to yell at you so much."

"I love you too."

"I know."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thank you for being so patient while I struggled with Chapter 6 - I hope this early posting of Chapter 7 makes up for the wait.
> 
> Thank you to everyone still following his story and to you who are reviewing and giving feedback - writing can be a lonely, solitary endeavour and knowing there are people reading and I'm not just shouting into the voice is indescribable.


	8. 8

Harvey has only just settled back into his bed after his first shaky walk down the hall in what his doctor has optimistically called 'physical therapy'. He imagined his stitches grating open with every step. He hasn't been in bed long enough to lose muscle mass or weight, at least not any more weight than he's already lost, but he's been in bed just long enough not to trust himself quite like he used to. There's a particular kind of loss that comes with major surgery that he wasn't expecting - the loss of confidence in your own body. He's worried, worried with low constancy, worried that lifting his arm too high will crack his lung open or that twisting his waist the wrong way will tear the metal staples holding him together. He's only just getting used to moving without drainage tubes catching against his skin, only just starting to accept that he's not on the verge of heart failure every time he sits up, only just now starting to think about anything other than breathing as a physical possibility.

And he's only just had a chance to throw a grumpy stare at the guard who snaps his cuff back around his wrist, only just settled back against the pillows and only just swallowed back a grimace at the pinch of burning lungs and ribs when Donna speaks.

"You okay?"

"Yeah." And despite everything, despite the pain and discomfort and worry, he's not lying. He's exhausted, shaky, he desperately needs a shave and a haircut (maybe; Donna says she likes it and has taken to absentmindedly scratching the tips of her fingers through his beard while she chats to Rachel on the phone in the afternoons, catching the uncut hair at his temple and toying it between her thumb and forefinger, and he thinks maybe that isn't so bad), and he's still staring down the barrel of 'what next' once the doctors decide he's well enough to go back into general population, or back to the infirmary at Danbury.

But he's not lying. Something's shifted; something in the way Donna looks at him is new and deeper than he thought he'd ever earn from her. There's something in the way he's been opening up that's making them something more than what he thought they'd be. He's learning, and it's slow, and he's still skirting around the edges of a lot of things, but he's trying, and it's making him different, and her different, and them different.

He feels threadbare, but he feels clean and lighter than he has in years.

He didn't think revealing the hardest, most brittle parts of himself would make him stronger and her softer and them better, but it has, and he thinks it's probably typical that he's only just realised this and maybe that's why Donna has called him an idiot so many times over the years.

So he says again, "yeah, I'm okay," and he lets his head fall against his pillow, and looks at Donna, and he can feel a smile tugging at his mouth and he bets his eyes are all soft and dopey and stupid because they've started to get like that when he looks at Donna, he knows because Mike keeps giving him a hard time about it and Harvey's lost track of how often he's told him to go do some work to get him out of jail and mind his own goddamn business.

She smiles back at him, says, "I think you should see your mother."

 _That_ was not what he was expecting.

"I - what?"

Donna lays her hand on his arm. "I think you're ready to forgive her."

She's looking at him with that steady trust and love that still makes discomfort bite in the back of his mind, but she also has that tone in her voice that he only hears when she's prepared to kind-heartedly eviscerate him if he puts up any kind of resistance to her.

"Forgive Lily?"

He doesn't call her mom. He never calls her mom.

Donna doesn't correct him, but she nods.

"She's still with Bobby," he says.

"So what, Harvey." She says it like it doesn't matter. Maybe it doesn't. But he still feels in him the habit to push the whole mess away and he feels it strongly enough to double down in throwing fuel and fire on top of old excuses.

"If she's still with him, then she's not sorry about what she did to my dad."

It's a reflex, this fight. He knows it so well and he's had this argument so often over the years that he's not even really fighting anymore, not in the way he thinks fighting should feel like. It's not a battle to construct arguments like he does when he steps foot in a courtroom, or in a deposition, or in the office of whoever it is he needs to beat down or blackmail. He's not trying to convince anyone anymore. It's just a speech he gives without thought or consideration, and he's never even checked to see if it's what he still thinks, but he still lets it drill out the old hatred in him, and he still sees red when he thinks of her and doesn't stop to think if it's anger or just too much practise. His shoulders bristle and his back tenses and that's a reflex too, something his body just does, like how his mind just snaps to anger and hurt and he's not thinking, not really.

But she squeezes his arm, and the pressure and gentle warmth is enough to stall him and short-circuit all the usual words and tension. She's still with him. Donna is still here, years of rebuffed conversations and folders slammed on tables and _I said I_ don't _want to fucking talk about her_ , but she's still here and trying again, and he shouldn't be surprised by that because God knows she's proven she has the patience of a saint, she's proven it over and over, and it's the patience in her that pushes his anger aside enough for him to try and hear her.

"Maybe, she says. "You might be right. But maybe she'd surprise you, if you were willing to hear her." He starts to interrupt, but she holds her palm up to him. "Listen. I get it. She did a horrible thing to your father, and she covered it up by doing a horrible thing to you. But it's been so long, Harvey. And she's been with Bobby for a long time. Whatever else, they've stood by each other, and they're going to stay together. You need to accept it and move past it."

"Do I shit," I says, but it comes out of him less angry than it does tired.

"You almost _died_ Harvey, and your mother isn't here. You didn't even see her before you went in. What if they hadn't gotten you back, Harvey? What if…" She trails off, and she doesn't say _what if Gallo gets to you again,_ but he can hear it sitting unsaid in the air. "And what if something happens to her while you're inside?" she says, and slides her hand to his and slips her fingers around his palm and thumb. She grips lightly, letting her thumb drift over the back of his hand. "I don't want to have the first time I'm in a room with both of you to be when we're putting one of you in the ground," she says, and her voice cracks a bit at that.

Oh.

He keeps realising it's not just him in the room anymore.

The problem is that he's tried, before, every now and then, in the dark of his living room at 1am with a glass of whisky. Tried to summon up forgiveness. He just doesn't know how it works enough to know if he's trying or just lying to himself.

He's never been able to figure out how much forgiveness is meant to feel like losing.

"I'm still so angry, Donna." It's a whisper, because his throat isn't working properly.

"You're not angry. You're scared."

"…why would I be scared of Lily?"

"Because she hurt you. And if you let her back in, she might hurt you again."

He doesn't say anything in response. There's nothing to say. She's right. So he just nods, and both hates and loves it that she can drill down into the core of him with a single sentence. And Donna, he thinks, sees something in his silence. He's not leaping to see Lily, but he's not refusing either. That's miles for him, he knows, miles from where he was even a year ago. And so,

"It's time," she says.

"You think so?"

"I do."

"How."

She thinks for a moment, and then says, "I think, at some point, you just have to decide."

He doesn't know if she's right, but he does trust her.

"Okay," he says. "I'll call her."

—

Donna isn't in the room with him when the door swings open and he looks up from the paperwork Mike has sent to him to go over.

Gallo is a slippery bastard and Mike has a few ideas, but he's roped Harvey in, hoping he'll be able to fill in the blanks of how Frank thinks, how they might be able to apply some loophole or regulation to their advantage. He has papers and folders fanned out over his lap and he's tugged a crease into the collar of his gown because he hasn't had a tie to play with absentmindedly while he tries to piece together a plan of attack.

At the moment, the best they have is for Harvey to request to go into solitary confinement for the remainder of his sentence, which is far from ideal, because it would necessitate Harvey telling the warden much more than he thinks is safe, and that puts him and Mike and Louis and God knows who else at greater risk, because Harvey doesn't know who Gallo has access to, either on the inside or on the outside. Cahill is looking into it, but he's been quiet for several days and Harvey knows better than to place his trust there. Cahill will come through if he can, he knows, but there's no guarantee.

Mike visited a day ago to drop the paperwork to him and say 'Jesus Christ' under his breath when he saw Harvey, before hiding his concern behind familiar insults about Harvey's age and new insults about his beard and physique. 'I didn't know liposuction left scars like this,' he'd said, and Harvey had good-naturedly told him to fuck off and that he should consider a beard of his own to cover up as much of his face as possible, and it had been nice to joke with Mike, and he hadn't even minded that much when Donna and Mike joined forces in a scathing rebuttal of Harvey's claim that chicks dig scars.

He hadn't minded either when Mike had left and Donna had nudged her nose into his cheek so she could murmur into his ear that she did, in fact, dig scars, his in particular, and even though he still felt exhaustion shot through every inch of his skin, he'd only just pushed down the instinct to dismantle his bed frame to free his cuffed wrist so that he could pull Donna into the bathroom and tear his stitches open pushing her up against the back of the door. Hospitals, he'd discovered, are deeply unsexy places, but Donna still manages to overcome the starched sheets and the beeping of machines and the smell of disinfectant with the way she looks at him like he's the only one, the way she speaks to him with that low murmur that sits in the back of her throat, the way she touches him in a way that's full of comfort and promise all at once.

He has to get out. He has to get back to her.

He's lost in thought, and so as the door swings open, he looks up, and the folder he's holding slips out of his hand, and he forgets to care about it. Everything in him shocks to a halt and instinct takes over, and it's instinct that drags the word past his throat.

"Mom."

"Harvey."

She's there, the first time in seven years, and she looks the same, but she also looks older - not the kind of older that humans gather over seven normal years of life, but the kind of older that comes alongside seven years of pain and regret and too many what-ifs. She's still beautiful and her eyes still shine out but she's lined and well-worn from time and phone calls that have rung to voicemail and invitations to visit that have gone unanswered. She's wearing a baseline of emotional exhaustion that's so ingrained it's like it's been sewn into her.

Harvey knows the feeling well.

"Oh my god." Lily says, her hands hovering in front of her, her body caught between the awkwardness of seven years of silence and the impulse to rush to her son. She's vibrating with the energy of being caught in between but it's only a moment before instinct wins and she drops her bag on the floor and moves to him. Her hands flutter over him for a moment, almost like she's scared to touch him, because of course she is, but then intuition takes over because he's her son and she cups his cheeks in her palms, and Harvey's free hand comes up to grab her wrist, but not to push her away, which surprises him. "Oh my god."

"I'm okay," he says, and he's mostly reassuring her but he's also saying it out loud to himself because she's here and her skin is warm and real and she's not imaginary, not the imaginary person she's been for the better part of a decade, and his heart is in his throat. He wonders how she knows, how she found him, but only dimly, because she's here now, and it's almost… relief. "It's okay. I'm okay."

"What happened?"

Harvey fills her in, and it almost spills out of him in a rush. He avoids the worst of it, the worst of his frailty and mistakes and culpability, the worst of the fear and hurt and how concrete walls have beaten him down, and she doesn't ask any questions so maybe she doesn't need to know. He tells her about Mike, and about his brain and his memory and his grandmother, about his dumbfuck briefcase of pot and everything that came after. He tells her about Jessica finding out, and Louis, and the arrest and trial, and about how he'd taken the fall to protect everyone at the firm because he owed them, and about Frank.

He doesn't tell her how close it came to her closing his casket instead of holding his face in her hands but that doesn't really matter anyway, he thinks. Lily doesn't interrupt him but her breath catches on certain details and he thinks how unfair it is that he's throwing this at her all at once, that he's throwing this at her at all, and it's the first time he's thought about how his silence has torn her and how it hasn't been so much about him protecting himself as it has been about him punishing her.

But there's a gut-level relief in unloading your struggles to your mother. It's a weight lifting off him in such a specific way that he almost doesn't recognise it, it's a feeling that he only remembers distantly and that he's buried down so deep he didn't even know he missed it.

He finally finishes, and sucks in a ragged breath because he thinks he forgot to breathe while he was telling her everything.

Lily says, "you can't go back in there with him," and there's a fierceness in her words, it's the kind of uncompromising, unflinching, I-will-end-your-existence-if-I-have-to tone that only mothers have, and it feels like everything is going to be okay when mothers talk like that. Even his.

"Louis and Mike are working on it," he says, and he hopes he sounds more confident in the room than he does in his head. "They'll figure something out."

"They said how close you came. The doctors."

 _Shit._ He opens his mouth to deflect and deny, to throw something out that sparks a confrontation because that's easier than honesty, and it's just habit, just reflex, but she sees it coming, God knows she's had the practise, and she speaks before he can.

"Don't, Harvey. Just… don't." He can hear it in her voice, worry shot through with weary. She's tired of fighting.

He's so fucking tired as well.

"I'm sorry," she says. "I'm so sorry for everything between us. Tell me what I can do to fix this. If anything had happened… I couldn't deal with that. I want to fix this."

"I'm sorry too," he says, and he finds to his surprise that he means it.

She's surprised too, he guesses, because she goes quiet for a moment, and it feels like she's been waiting for that for much longer than she should have, way past when she should have given up and written him off, and he suddenly realises with a start that her calling him and sending him letters and asking him to visit hasn't been her harassing him, but her holding a door open, long past when she should have just given up.

It's a gift. He'd just never noticed it before.

"What can I do to make you forgive me?" Lily asks again.

He sighs. "It's not you, Lily. Mom. I think, at some point, I just have to decide."

"I'm so sorry. For all the pain I caused. For making you lie. For dragging you into the world before you were ready for it. I regret it every day. If I could change it, if I could go back… I should have protected you, Harvey. You're my son. And I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry too." He's not eloquent, never is when he needs to be. When it really matters he's clumsy, words don't work for him, and he forgets every closing argument he's ever made, but he tries. "I'm sorry for fucking this up. I did it for way too long than is fair. I should have been better."

"I love you, Harvey."

"I love you too, mom." He sits up as much as he can, and then he's hugging her, and it's unfamiliar, and it's comforting, and it's different, and weird to feel like something is so foreign and so familiar all at once. It's going to take some getting used to, and there's going to be hard conversations, and there will be disagreements, and things to talk about at much more length and depth than they can when he's in a hospital bed or from behind a locked door at Danbury.

But it's a start. A start is something. A start is everything.

Harvey hears the door click open, and he glances up and sees Donna. She's been hovering just outside the door, he'd bet money on it, but he doesn't have it in him to be irritated. She smiles at him, that secret smile she has for him when he's done something she's proud of. He supposes it doesn't need to be a secret smile anymore, but it still feels like it, and he likes that there are things she still tucks away just for him.

"Hey," she says, and Lily pulls back, and this is not how he thought Donna would meet her. In reality he hadn't ever thought about Donna meeting her, at all, but if he had, this wouldn't have been it.

"Hello," Lily says, and she has that tone in her voice mothers only get when their sons have been hiding a girlfriend from them, it's a statement and a question all in one and Harvey feels his spine squirm in a very specific way that he hasn't since he brought Shannon Baker over when he was fifteen and Lily had said 'hello' in the exact same way then too.

He clears his throat, says, "Mom, this is Donna. Donna, this is Lily."

He starts to try and figure out any way to sum up who Donna is and what thirteen years of yesses, nos, maybes, almosts and finallys mean in less than an hour, but Lily speaks before he can and says, "Oh yes, you're the best thing that's ever happened to my son."

Harvey stares blankly, and Donna looks surprised, if not like she disagrees, and before Harvey's mouth can catch up with his brain, Lily says to Donna, "oh, don't look so surprised, he talks about you to Marcus all the time."

"Does he now." Donna raises an eyebrow at Harvey, and Harvey has the uncomfortable realisation that Donna and Lily are probably going to get on very well.

"Marcus is as big a fan of you as I am," Lily says, and then asks, "would I be right in assuming that there's something more between you than work these days?"

"You would," Harvey says, and he thinks he should be embarrassed at how proud his voice sounds, but he isn't.

"It's new," Donna says, and she doesn't say anything about him telling her he loves her or about asking her to marry him or the way she made him a different person than he was a few months and too many years ago, maybe she thinks that's too much for right now, but her smile says enough. "We're figuring it out. This," she waves her hand at the hospital room and their general situation, "is making it hard, but … it's good. We're good."

"I'm so happy for you," Lily says. "I always knew he needed you."

"You have no idea."

"Guys, I'm right here," Harvey complains. He looks at Donna, and she sees the thought _Jesus do you think you could get on a little less well_ in his eyes, and she tilts her head to say 'no', and he feels both ganged up on and strangely content.

"Yeah and you're here because of the last decision you made without me," Donna says, and he tries to look betrayed but he thinks he's probably smiling.

"I thought we were feeling sorry for me," he says.

Donna sits, and this is new. He's always said he didn't need his parents, especially not his mother, and he's always said he's not the kind of guy who finds one woman for forever, and he's told himself that so many times over the years whenever he didn't pick up the phone or broke it off before the fifth date or sat by himself at home and called it freedom that he'd actually started to believe it.

And now here he is with his mom on one side of his bed and his fiancé on the other and he somehow feels more like himself than he thinks he ever has, and he realises Donna's right and he's an idiot.

They talk, and it's still surface, it will be for a while, but it's enough.

—

"Thanks, Donna."

It's close to the end of visiting hours, and he's sitting in the limbo where he doesn't want her to go, but he's too exhausted to want her to stay. Lily had left not long before, and the afternoon had set something right inside him that had been out of joint for so long, and it felt like peace, but it had worn out his bones and shaken out his soul. He's got his head back against the pillows, dozing, and she's toying his hair through her fingers as she reads next to him, and his voice is more of a slur than a murmur because sleep is chasing him.

"Mmm?" she says, and she blinks away from her book, and he loves that reading sends her away from him in the same way staring at her sends him away from everything and everyone else. She's rich with imagination, and she plows that into her work and her words, but he loves when she turns it to reading and music because it's so peaceful and he feels like he's discovering her again.

"Thanks for pushing me."

She smiles, kisses his temple, and he loves that habit she's developing. "You two are going to be okay?"

"I think so. It'll take time. There's a lot there. It won't all just disappear. But I think we'll be okay." He thinks for a moment, then says, "I couldn't have done any of today if you weren't… us."

"Well apparently you've been hopelessly in love with me for years, if your desperate phone calls to Marcus to talk about how great I am are any clue."

"Can we kiss now? I think I've been emotionally battered enough for the day."

"You can have a kiss when you've brushed your teeth."

"I know you called her."

"I knew you wouldn't."

"I would have."

She waits with that eyebrow of hers tilted at him.

"Okay, maybe I wouldn't have right away."

"Sometimes we all just need a little help, Harvey."

"I know."

She kisses him anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thank you for hanging in with this story! I'm finding my way when it comes to multichapters. I'm hoping this tames some of the hurt we've all felt knowing that Donna and Lily never got a chance to meet in real life.
> 
> As always, your reviews mean the world.


	9. Chapter 9

He has to go back.

It’s been just on six weeks. Harvey’s stitches are out, and he’s over the fear that his body is going to tear itself back in half every time he stretches or exercises, and he’s not as scared of the physiotherapy anymore either. He’s jogging, just, starting to stretch and build his muscles again with kettle bells and medicine balls while his therapist pretends to be a personal trainer.

He’s not sure if he should be happy the stitches are out or terrified because it means he’s going to be shunted away from the hospital and back into prison. He hates the hospital, but he doesn’t hate seeing Mike and Donna and he doesn’t hate full nights of sleeping, falling asleep with her hand in his and talking to his mom on the phone and getting to walk outside where there is grass and birdsong, albeit with his hands and ankles cuffed together (the first time Donna saw him like that her hand went to her mouth, but then she made a joke with tears behind her eyes and he supposes that’s about right for where they’ve found themselves).

He probably should have gone back a couple of weeks earlier, but Mike and Louis worked their usual magic with injunctions and court orders and tied up the works enough to keep Harvey out as long as possible. He’d thanked Mike when he’d told him a couple of weeks ago with a silent nod and hoped his eyes showed that he was thankful, that he was grateful. Mike just looked at him like he still owed him, still haunted that it was Harvey and not him.

Harvey thinks he knows how he feels. He owes Donna everything.

Donna and Harvey have had the two weeks but the clock has been counting down and they both know it. They’ve been taking turns being the strong one. Some days it’s him, and he says _it’s going to be okay_ while Donna presses her forehead against his and he feels the shaking of her body in her fingers against his cheek. He reminds her that they’re going to get through it and when he gets out they’re going to get married and start over and forget any of this ever happened. He knows that’s not true - they’ll never forget it, it’s going to be something that follows them, however far away, because he’s not a lawyer anymore so they can’t go back to normal because there’s no normal to go back to, and he’s going to carry scars across his ribs and torso forever, but still. He says it’s going to be okay, and he believes it, because everything that really matters is right where it needs to be.

Some days it’s her, and she holds the back of his neck steady in her hands as he grits through the edges of a panic attack and lets him dampen the front of her shirt with sweat and salt. She tells him that they’ll figure out a way to keep him safe and get him out, and he can do it, and she’ll write and call and miss him. The missing him parts always make him feel worse as much as they make him feel better, but he’s always waited for her to leave, except now, except the last few months, and not feeling like he’s just waiting for her to leave is worth the missing. So she hugs him, and talks him through his fears and his shaking, and he thinks he can do it if she’s with him.

Some days they’re both, comforting and comforted all at once and they just squeeze their fingers together in the silence.

At least he’s wearing clothes again, he thinks. He always thought happiness was complicated, but it turns out happiness is as simple as not having to wear a hospital gown for weeks on end. Donna’s bought him pair of fresh tracksuit bottoms and a crisp white t-shirt and hooded sweatshirt, and it’s just so that he can walk from the hospital to the gates of Danbury without looking like he’s escaped from the ward, but the doctors have been letting him wear them and he feels more human than he has in a month.

“I’ve got it,” Mike says from nowhere, and Harvey looks up as he pushes the door open with his shoulder, juggling paper like it’s his first day again, shirt sleeves rolled up, and he’s not shaved in at least two days.

“Got what? Lost on your way to the bathroom? You look like shit.”

Mike must be serious because he doesn’t stop to respond with an insult or a movie quote, he just drops a small stack of paper onto Harvey’s lap and jabs his finger at the parts he’s highlighted. “He’s running a smuggling ring.”

Harvey scans the list, then looks up. “Gallo?”

“Gallo.” Mike jams his hands in his pockets and grins like he’s just solved some intractable math problem.

“You seem happy.”

“I do.”

“You seem happy that he’s not just pissed at me and violent but that he probably also has half the other inmates and most of the guards in his pockets,” Harvey clarifies.

“I am.”

“Why.”

Mike, as it turns out, has just gotten off the phone to Cahill, and before that, Louis. He’s knocked together a deal of sorts. It’s about as harebrained a plan as Mike’s ever come up with, which is saying something.

Mike lays his plan out. It’s insane.

Harvey stares at him, unblinking and quiet for a moment, and then when it’s clear he’s not, in fact, joking, he takes a breath.

“So,” Harvey clarifies, “you want me to become friends with Gallo and offer to help with legal advice and enable him to act as his own lawyer so that he can protect himself from his own crimes, so that I can somehow get a smoking gun on the smuggling ring that Gallo - who, by the way, wants to shove a knife through my ribs - is running, so that I can turn him over to Cahill, who thinks I’m a piece of shit, and hope that he thinks Gallo is a bigger piece of shit than me, so that he’ll let me out?”

Mike quirks his eyebrows like they’re making a bet. “Yup.”

“And Cahill’s agreed to this?”

“He will.”

“Mike. You’ve just asked me to commit career, and possibly physical, suicide. I’m going to need better than ‘he will’.”

“I’ll get it. But I needed to tell you before you go back in.”

“And Louis is okay with this?”

Mike hesitates.

“Jesus, Mike.”

“I’ll get him to agree, okay? Just…” Mike sighs. “Just trust me.”

“I trust you. I don’t trust Gallo. He’s a fucking maniac.”

“I know.” Mike scrubs his hand over his face. “But this is your best shot. Cahill wants Gallo. He doesn’t give a shit about you. And Gibbs already has you. You can’t practise law again. She won’t stop Cahill letting you out early. Trust me. This’ll work.”

Harvey drops his head back on the pillows. He thinks for a moment, then says, “I’ll consider it.”

Mike looks like he wants to push further, but thinks better of it. Instead, he says, “one more thing.”

“What?”

Mike lifts a key in his hand and smiles that goddamn smile again.

Harvey looks around. “Where the fuck did you get that?” he whispers.

“Please, I spent years tricking security guards before I met you. The guys down the hall aren’t exactly Serpico. And you steal one handcuff key - “

“You steal them all,” Harvey finishes.

Mike grins as he slips around the side of his bed and unhooks the cuff from his bed frame. He leaves it attached to Harvey’s wrist. “Just the one side. Snap it back on if the fuzz show up.”

“Look Mike, it’s not like I’m gonna complain that I can go to the toilet without having some guy in a uniform hovering outside my door, but why did you do this?”

“Donna’s on her way.”

“Yeah I know, she texted me.”

Mike raises an eyebrow.

“Ah.”

“Don’t forget to use pr-“

“Get the fuck out right now.”

—

“What are you going to do?” Donna asks.

She’s got his hand in both of hers. They’ve been talking through Mike’s plan. Harvey thinks it’s generous to call it a plan. Donna thinks so too, and she’s said so out loud.

“I don’t know,” Harvey says. “Mike’s gone from wanting me to sit in the hole by myself for two years to keep away from Gallo to wanting me to be his best friend. I don’t know if I can…”

What? Trust Gallo? Trust himself? Trust Cahill and Mike? There’s so many what-ifs and so many things that need to go right for this to even have a chance. It’s a long shot.

It’s a hell of a long shot. 

“Yeah,” Donna says, and Harvey knows she’s processing all that same things he can’t say out loud because it’s too much like admitting defeat.

“But, I can’t …” He squeezes her hand instead of saying _I can’t be away away from you that long_. And he can’t. Not anymore. Before he went in, when he first went in, he thought he could handle it. But the stabbing, the last 6 weeks in the hospital, Lily - it’s changed everything.

Sort of. Harvey’s always been unable to be away from her. He’s just managed to figure it out now.

“Yeah,” she says again.

She squeezes his hand.

“So, what do you think?” he asks.

“It’s your decision, Harvey. I want you h-” she almost can’t say it, her voice is thick. “I want you home. I want you with me, and yeah, part of me wants you to do whatever you need to. But it’s dangerous, and it’s your choice. I’ll support whatever you decide to do.”

Christ, he shouldn’t look into her eyes when he’s trying to make a huge decision. All he wants to do is whatever it takes to stare at her for as long as possible. That desire strikes him dimly as pretty juvenile, but he supposes he’s just making up for lost time.

He nods, but he doesn’t say anything. He can’t choose. Not yet anyway. She seems to know, and she lets it slide.

“You think you’ll need to shave when you go back in?” she asks instead. She asks about his beard a lot. Apparently, Harvey in a beard is something she’s thought a lot about over the years.

“I guess when I’m first readmitted. They don’t seem to care too much after that.” He scratches his fingers through the growth on his cheek absentmindedly.

“Keep it.”

“Yeah?”

She leans in to kiss him. “Yeah.”

He almost forgets he can lift both hands to her jaw to cup it and kiss her back. Donna doesn’t miss a thing though, because of course she doesn’t, she can read his mood in the soft lines creasing around his eyes and how he’s slept in the way he blinks and she doesn’t miss this either.

“Hands,” she murmurs against his mouth.

“Mmmhmm.”

“Both of them.”

“Uh huh.” He’s trying to talk and kiss her at the same time, but the kissing takes preference and so he’s not exactly eloquent.

“Mike?”

“Mmm.”

“Knew we kept that kid around for a reason.”

She pulls him out of bed.

——

The bathroom is not an ideal place. They haven’t been together, not beyond hands and mouths slipped against each other, since he’d walked away from her and inside concrete walls the first time. It’s been months, and it feels longer than the god-knows-how-many years he spent staring at her through glass doors and trying to cover his stares with smiles and teasing, because at least then he got to hope _maybe today_ , even though he tried not to think that and then he’d think it anyway and he’d bury it as soon as he did. An ideal place, he thinks, would be back in his house, in their bed, preferably for at least two days and with a fridge full of champagne and strawberries.

He longs for her, not just to be buried inside her, loose and languid and sweat slicked, but to be beside her, learning the ways her head fits against his chest, learning that he loves her wearing too big clothes that smell of him with her hair piled on top of her head in a messy bun just as much as he loves her elegant and polished and wearing the fuck out of a dress from some designer he’s never heard of.He longs to sit, reading, with her breathing long and slow against him, her own book drooping as she nods off in the quiet pull of the evening. He wants to make her coffee and pass her the container of Thai food they’re sharing while they sit cross legged on the floor of his lounge and he wants to nudge green curry from the corner of her mouth with his thumb. He wants all of the normality and mundanity of being together, because he denied her and himself for so long and then fell into her orbit so late that they haven’t really had time for any of that, not yet. He wants to learn her beyond learning the way she moans and how to make her gasp against his skin. He wants to know all her atoms and all her parts gathered and stitched up in the wonder of her that’s so much that it makes him want to say her name like he’s praying.

And he wants to wake her up in the long slow of the early morning by nudging his lips behind her ear and tickling his fingers along her sides until she stirs and stretches and edges her butt into his hips. He wants to feel her push back against him and have her slide her arm behind her to hook his neck, to feel his skin blistering goosebumps underneath her fingers and to hear her hum contentedly in the way she does when she’s waking up and wants skin on skin. He wants to murmur _good morning_ through gravelled and bottomed out vocal chords and then whisper into her ear that he wants to make her come.

He wants her. Good god, he wants her.But they don’t have strawberries and a bedroom and two days to themselves, and they don’t have messy buns and Harvard sweats and Thai, they don’t have early mornings and they don’t have cocktail dresses with the long zippers up the back that beg him to drag them back open to her hips in the elevator up to his apartment.

But she’s perfect, she’s beautiful, she’s leading him into the bathroom with her hand slipped in his and with that smile she saves just for him, and he thinks, the bathroom will do.

He locks the door and turns as she slides her hands over him, resting her palms up against his chest, and she nudges her lips over his, light and gentle, and he lets his hands fall to her hips, and she pushes into his space, leaning her length against his, and it’s the first time, the first time in what feels like forever that she’s had her body against his without anyone or anything in the way and he thinks _finally_. He touches his tongue against hers, then sweeps it into her mouth, god she tastes good, she tastes like the light at the end of a too long night, and she fits against him like nobody else ever has, like she was made to fit against him, and her back is the perfect shape for him to run his hands up, index fingers tickling the curve of her spine.

She’s pushing his t-shirt up over his stomach and chest, and he raises his arms so she can pull it over his head. He wants to hold her, wants to pull her against him and over him and he wants to lose so many moments with her, but something unexpected is happening - the flush of cool against his skin doesn’t feel like it normally does. He’s distracted, self-conscious, he feels thin and his skin feels like paper, see through and delicate and he’s obvious and exposed. He hasn’t got that solid layer of fat and muscle anymore, the fat from the whisky and the steak is gone and the muscle from the boxing and running is too, that bulk that filled his suits out and felt like armour. Now he’s just taut against his own bones, leaner than he’s been in a long time, and he feels like he’s not ready. He hasn’t been with her for nearly four months and he tells himself that it’s insane that he doesn’t feel ready, it’s insane that he’s nervous and unsure and besides, he’s not a fucking teenager, but he still feels it, and he’s not as good as he used to be at ignoring how he feels. He’s told that’s a good thing, but he still hates how he bumps up against himself unexpectedly. 

He hates unexpected.

She has her hands on him, on the muscle and fat that isn’t there anymore, on the scars that are, his head tipping to the side unconsciously as she presses open mouth kisses down his neck and to his collarbone. Her touch is the world, and it pushes a shiver over his skin and makes his hips twitch, and it’s everything, and it’s too much all at once, and Harvey wants her with a fierce abandon but he also feels panic rising, the instinct to stop her clutching at his bones and he tries to say ‘Donna’, but he says ‘stop’ and he says ‘no’.

He stills her hands with his because … because.

Because he’s changed, so much, and he even feels change where there isn’t. He’s wearing new scars over old skin, his body is different now in how it looks and how it sits, it’s easier for him to hold his own bones but he’s so much more vulnerable now than he was and he doesn’t know if he’s ready for how much the last few weeks of conversations with her and the way he’s let her dig him up has rearranged his atoms, and he thought they were just talking but it’s more than that. It’s changed his brain but it’s also changed his body from the inside out, and he suddenly feels like he’s navigating this all over again like a kid, like his first time, and he realises how far away he is from how he’s always done this, how far he’s pushed away from _caring makes you weak_. Because he cares, and he’s always cared about her, but he cares now in a way where he knows it beyond anything like he has before, where he loves her beyond how he ever thought he could love. Even in the abstract he didn’t think he could love like this, but he does, he loves her like he’d love breathing if breathing wasn’t a certainty, and he fucking _cares_ , and it’s making him realise how much of all of this is completely out of his control.

And he realises, he’s scared.

It’s the first time he’s ever said no when someone’s had their hands on him like this. He’s always followed through, even when he’s wanted to say no, or wanted to leave, or wanted to talk instead. He’s never said no, not once he was skin to skin with someone, even when he knew it was a bad idea or when he didn’t want to or when he knew he was hurling himself into something dark and wrong. No was for before hands on chests and before shirts being dropped the ground. No was for dinner invites, or suggestions of drinks, or for people with rings on their fingers smiling at him like vultures in the corners of bars. No isn’t for anything after the door clicking shut and the feeling of fingers on his skin.

No is sudden, and suddenly means a lot when someone has his hands on him like this. When he was younger he thought it meant … whatever asshole frat boys call you when you say it. Jerkoff macho bullshit like ‘pussy’ or ‘homo’ or other toxic words that pushed a terrified kid like him to lie about what girls felt like in high school locker rooms so that he wouldn’t get his face kicked in behind the gym after school. But they saw through him and kicked his face in any way.

That’s when he asked his dad if he could start boxing lessons, and quietly resolved never to say no to any girl that wanted him, because fucking someone you didn’t really want was way better than getting concussed by Dylan Bagby for the eighth time.

Later, after he walked in on his mom, no felt like admitting sex meant more to him than fucking. But if no meant sex meant more than fucking, then that meant his mom wasn’t just fucking other people but making love to them, and that his dad wasn’t enough, that romance and commitment and love at first sight weren’t enough, that was too much to think.

So Harvey never said no. Harvey said yes. Yes meant sex was meaningless. Yes meant his mom hadn’t hurt him. Yes meant he was the best goddamn closer in New York and yes meant he could close any woman he wanted and yes meant he was in control even when he wasn’t.

He says it now, to the only person he feels that he shouldn’t really need to say it to, and he feels his breath catch because there’s still an irrational fear in him that believes that saying no to people when they have their skin against his will make them leave or, worse, make them hurt him.

“Donna,” he says, squeezing her hands under his, his chest grabbing too-big breaths out of the air, and it’s not panic but it could be. “I just … need a moment.”

Donna stops, and looks at him, and he can’t quite meet her gaze so she nudges her chin, catches his eyes with hers, and she says “it’s okay, Harvey. Take all the time you need,” and she looks at him like she understands and like she loves him anyway. It washes a depth of relief through him that he has to swallow back, breathing through a lump in his throat and blinking away rising tears.

“Sorry. This all just feels … really different.” He gestures to his body and hopes she knows he means it’s bigger than that.

She does, but she lets that sit in the silence because she knows he still doesn’t like to talk about it. She lays her hand on the scar snaking from his belly button to his sternum. “Does it hurt?”

He runs fingertips up her arms. “My brain wants it to, but it doesn’t. It’s more like…”

“What?”

He shrugs. The scars coming, the fat and muscle going, the ‘no’ that came from his mouth and his soul before he could stop it - it’s a lot.“It feels like it’s not really my body anymore.”

Donna hums at that. She traces her fingers over his ribs, slowly, watching him with a silent _is this okay?_ in her eyes, then flattens her palms against his skin, smoothing over his torso, and then presses up to his chest, and she lets his scars sit easy under her hands, she doesn’t avoid them but she doesn’t pause over them, she just runs her touch over them like she does the rest of him, and she says, “feels like you to me,” and he knows then that she doesn’t care, they’re just part of him now, and she’ll love them like she loves every other mark and flaw and shadow on his skin, and maybe everything in his brain is just part of him now too, and she’ll love that as well.

“Why am I like this?” he asks, and he isn’t sure what he wants her to say in response.

She considers for a moment, looks him in the eye. “Because healing hurts, Harvey.”

Her touch is like nothing else, mixing electricity and warmth, she feels like home and she feels like mystery all at once. He feels his lungs expand, chest rising and falling against her hands . She makes him feel like he’s living. She feels like life.

Maybe it’s always meant to feel like this. He doesn’t really know.

He closes his eyes briefly. When he opens them, she’s still there. So he kisses her. ‘No’ changes to ‘yes’, because she loves him and she’s saved him.

There’s a beauty in the rhythmic press of his lips against hers over and over, mouths closing against each other and then open again, in the way his thumb comes up to stroke her cheek and in the way she tickles her fingers through his beard and into the hair at the point where his neck and skull meet. There’s a beauty in the sweet way she smiles against his mouth and murmurs that he needs a hair cut and she washes away all the fear over how his body works now and what that means for his brain and what it means for yes and no, and then it’s just him and her again, and yes it’s new, but it’s familiar and it’s safe and she’s home.

She lets him guide the pace, waiting until he pushes his hands under her shirt to slide her own solidly back up over his chest so she can catch his nipples under her palms and make him grunt against her teeth. He’s still as sensitive there as he’s ever been, and that floods a relief through him, that maybe all this has not so much changed him as it has added to him, and he hooks one hand around her waist to snug her hips to him. She breathes his name against his mouth and says she loves him as she thumbs his nipples into taut buds. He finds the zipper at the back of her dress and releases it all the way down to her waist, and it pools to the ground while Harvey slides both hands down her back to cup her butt. She slides her arms around his neck for support, presses her chest against his, and the full flush of her body against him feels like everything he’s ever hoped for. His hips twitch, and he pushes a leg between hers, searching for the momentary relief that friction gives, and finds it with a low moan against her skin.

Donna drags her hands down his back, scratching lightly and lighting up a shiver under her touch. There’s an instinct in him to drop his head into her neck, to focus on her hips and hands and the way he can feel himself pressing against her thigh, but she brings her mouth to his and kisses him, murmurs that she loves him, and the push of her body and soul against his makes his stomach hollow out.

He moves, backing her up, and he doesn’t have far to go before she nudges into the bathroom vanity.He hooks his hands around her, lifts her up onto it, swallowing the bizarre need to apologise to her that they aren’t in his bed or her bed. But it forces an artificial height difference that they both love, and he nudges his mouth up in the space where her jaw and neck meet, laying his tongue over her skin before sucking his teeth against her, tangling his hands into her hair before letting his fingers drag down her neck and shoulders.

Donna slides her hands between them, slides her thumbs over his nipples, teasing them, and he feels every touch in his core and in the thrum of his pulse against his chest, and his eyes shut against the sensation so he can focus on getting her bra unhooked. He slides the straps off her shoulders, and as she moves her hands to let it fall he brings his own up to her chest, pushing his hands over to cup her breasts and nudge her nipples under his palms. She pushes a long slow breath out as he does, stills for several long seconds, letting him massage her in the silence and in the still, and he loves when she does this, slows down to just let herself feel every touch and every moment. And then she cups his jaw and tips his head back so she can slide her lips over his, kissing and tasting lazily, and there’s a hint of the frantic underneath but it’s not on the surface yet.

Donna trails her hands down his shoulders, down his sides, hooks her fingers through the waistband of his track pants and somehow manages to use it as leverage to pull his hips against hers while also pulling them down, and they hook down over his butt and to his thighs but not quite far enough to free his cock, so he nudges her thighs apart with one hand and walks his hips against hers. The fabric of his pants pushes against her underwear and he knows it’s that kind of delicious not-quite-enough friction she’s keening for because she mmm’s against his lips and pushes her hips against his, and the bathroom isn’t ideal but the counter height is so he supposes it’s not all bad.

He slowly rocks his hips against hers, fabric pushing frustration and need between them both, and he drops his head and circles his tongue around her nipple, letting the cool of moisture peak it, waiting until he hears ‘fuck, Harvey’, please’, to nip down lightly with his teeth before drawing his mouth over and sucking lazily. She’s got her hands at the back of his head, holding his mouth against her, as if there’s anything else he’d rather be doing, and he slides his other hand over her stomach, tickling over skin slowly slicking smooth with sweat.

Donna gets her hand to his hip and pushes him back from her just enough to press her hand down the front of his track pants and to his cock, and she wraps her hand around him, squeezing with the perfect amount of pressure to spike tension and madness into his brain. “God, Donna,” he says, and blindly pushes as the waistband of his pants, pushes it down to his thighs, freeing himself in her hand so she can stroke along his length and squeeze his tip.

He can’t decide where to lay his mouth, his hands, he wants to touch all of her all at once and pull her into him and he doesn’t know where to start, but instinct takes over and makes the decision for him, and he sucks her bottom lip between his while his hands drag her underwear down past her hips. He slides two fingers up between her folds, nudging her clit with each stroke, his fingers slick with her, and he’s just trying to tease her but she sighs heavy against his mouth and her exhale turns into a whispered “inside”, and he pushes his fingers into her up to his knuckles, tips her head back with his other hand so he can lathe his tongue down her neck to her clavicle, and he thrills with the vibration of Donna gasping his name against his mouth.

He curls his fingers, thrusts, and finds the spot up behind her pelvic bone, strokes firmly with two fingers. He finds her clit with his thumb and draws a line along it rhythmically. He feels her shift against him, her clit hooding under his thumb and her walls clenching around his fingers. Donna’s arm circles around his shoulder, pulling him tight, and the rhythm of her hand along his cock falters.

It’s been too long, for both of them, and it’s only moments before she shatters apart around his fingers, her abdomen fluttering and muscles quivering around him. She’s trying to be quiet and not having much success but he doesn’t care because he loves the sound of her voice.

She’s barely blinked back from the static of orgasm before he slides his grip around her hips and edges her to the front of the vanity, shifts his hips to hers and sinks himself inside her.

“Fuck,” he says, then “goddammit Donna,” and then he draws back and thrusts in again and they both say “I love you,” at the same time. He leans forward on too thin arms so he can lay his mouth against hers and air punches out of his lungs with each thrust as he vainly attempts to kiss her. It’s too much to handle, too much sensation all at once, and he buries his face into her neck. The push and pull of his hips against hers is glorious, the way she grinds and squeezes around his cock, it’s everything, it’s beyond lust and sex and fucking, it’s not even making love, it’s both somehow, and he never thought he’d get both. He doesn’t deserve it, doesn’t deserve her, but she’s pulling him close to being close enough.

Her moans climb higher and faster like an invisible countdown, her breathing just barely controlled as her lungs force primality past her vocal chords, and he loves how she does that, loves how she doesn’t have to say ‘I’m going to come’ because he can read it in her pulse and the pitch of her voice and in the way her gasps shallow out.

He’s nearly gone too, he’s moaning with each thrust, and half of them are wordless but half of them are _‘_ Donna’, and healing hurts she said but sometimes it feels like this as well, he thinks.

He’s close, he’s so close, and he doesn’t say it but she reaches out blindly, finds his hand, threads her fingers through his and squeezes and how did she know he needed that, needed her grounding him just at that moment, how does she always know exactly what to do.

She comes, and he throws himself after her.

Afterwards, in the quiet, their breath punching through the silence and his forehead against hers, he says, “I wish…”

She says, “I know.”

—

Going back in is worse.

It’s worse because when Harvey left Donna the first time he wasn’t sure what he wasn’t getting into, and he didn’t know. He didn’t know that being with her but not near her was so, so much worse than being near her but not with her. He didn’t know that lying awake thinking about touching her was way harder when he could freshly remember the slick of her sweat and skin under his fingers.

It’s worse because he’s different now, and he feels all his vulnerability sitting close to the surface, and it feels like something he’s always wanted when he’s with Donna, but in prison he wishes he could go back to being the Harvey who doesn’t give a shit, who can turn off caring about anyone and everyone, who can become the single thought of _survive_.

Caring isn’t weakness, but the reason he thought it was for so long is because caring is fucking hard.

It’s worse because Gallo is spooked enough by Mike and Louis and Cahill sniffing around that he doesn’t reappear to shove a screwdriver through his rib cage again, but he also doesn’t let up. He just engages a collection of faceless thugs to pummel the shit out of him during yard time every now and then - not enough to put him in the infirmary; just enough to make him wince as he lays his battered frame down in the evenings and edge his finger gently against swollen eye sockets to try and guess how long before he can see properly again.

He tries anyway, tries to do what Mike suggests, tries to circle around the edges of whatever operation Gallo is running, tries to figure out a way in. And that’s worse as well, because Harvey starts having to look over his shoulder and when he does he sees people looking quickly away from him like they were staring and the first time Harvey was in he felt like he was being crushed under the weight of his own humanity, but now he’s starting to feel like a hunted animal and that’s even worse.

And then there’s another stabbing. But this time it’s not Harvey, it’s Gallo, and Gallo dies, and along with it the deal that Cahill and Mike worked out. Gallo dies on a Monday, and Cahill pulls the deal on a Thursday. Mike comes by himself to tell him, all black ringed eyes and unshaven and _I’m so sorry_ but it doesn’t make any difference and there’s nothing they can do. 

Harvey does the full two years.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry about the two years thing. 
> 
> Reviews are appreciated, even if you just want to swear at me about the two years.


	10. Chapter 10

_Year One_

**Words**

Getting a letter from Donna gives Harvey the same kind of thrill he used to get when they looked at each other from their desks for moments that went on way longer than they should have. There’s a specific and familiar tug in his chest that’s been ingrained into his soul, equal parts hopeful and bittersweet. She writes to him, and he can feel her calm faith in him radiating on the page. 

She really fucking believes in him and it shows in every line of her pen. She’s an anchor, keeping him tethered to their world and making sure he still has one to go back to. She manages to spill honesty onto the page without ever letting go of the unflinching faith she has in him. 

She talks so much about the future. She details plans, and ideas, and thoughts, huge decisions and inconsequential details, all pushed together like they all matter just as much. He loves that she thinks about him and he worries that she thinks about him too much, but he trusts her further than his own gut and so he believes it’s healthy that she thinks about him so much because she’s exactly where he’s trying to get to. 

She writes, and he loves her.

When she writes him, when a letter drops into his hands from the guards, he reads over the words carefully, pressing his thumbs over the ink and handwriting, and then tucks the letter under his pillow before the lights crank off. He feels like if he tries hard enough he can smell her perfume on the paper through the pillows. He falls asleep with the imagination of her smell around him and her touch over him dancing in his imagination. 

He’s desperate to get through the next months and get back to her and figure out how to be the person she sees when she looks at him. 

**Voice**

She calls, and he can hear her in love with him. He can hear it in the way she finishes her sentences. Her voice always tilts downwards, even when she’s asking a question, and he knows in the certainty in her tone that she’s all faith and trust, and for some reason she’s settled all her confidence in him. He loves her voice, loves how it shifts when it’s just them, like she’s been holding something aside for him that only he’s allowed to see. 

He doesn’t like to talk too much when she calls. His end of the line isn’t private, he’s hyper aware of the queue of waiting inmates hovering close by, and besides, he spends most of the week trapped with his own thoughts ringing in his ears and the last thing he wants is to hear them all out loud. So he lets her chat to him, and he hums at the right moments and feels himself smile down the phone. It’s the only time he smiles easily, talking to her. 

“Hey you,” she says. 

“Hey,” he says back. “Miss you.”

“Miss you too.” He can hear her shift; it’s a Saturday and he guesses she’s sitting on her sofa, probably with her feet tucked up and with a cup of coffee. “Louis and Jessica say hi. They’ve been debating what to do with your office, finally.”

“Did you tell them I said it was fine? They’ll need to pack my things up at some point.” He doesn’t say _it’s not like I’m going to use it again_ , but it’s in the air between them and the thought makes the sound of his voice bittersweet. 

“I did. I think you underestimate how nostalgic Louis can get. He keeps walking in to try and make plans for it and then he cries over your records and leaves again. Mike’s been using it in the interim. I think everyone would be fine if it just carried on like that. Mike loves it. You should see him trying not to gloat at the other associates.”

“I bet he’s not trying that hard.”

“He really isn’t. Smug little shit.” 

“Has he hijacked you as well?”

“Mmm.” She sips at her drink and laughs lightly. “I offered for Jessica to reassign me, but.” He can almost hear her shrug. “I just don’t think Louis and Jessica have it in them to change anything too much.”

“That doesn’t sound like Jessica.”

“You’d be surprised, Harvey. She misses you. I’ve basically started giving her updates every morning in the office just to save her having to ask. I swear she’s only ever an inch from hanging flowers off your name on the wall. She’s just holding it together so Louis doesn’t cave in completely. And Mike is good to work with.” 

“Let me guess, he cries and asks you what to do every time he gets a phone call.”

“He actually listens to me, which is a nice change,” she says, matching his sarcasm and pulling a low huff of laughter from him. “He and Rachel ask me out for drinks after work. It’s nice. Normal.” She considers that for a moment. “Ish. It always feels a bit like cheating, not having you. I keep making mental lists of places to take you. New bars and restaurants. All the changes they’re landscaping into the park. Things like that. And then I feel bad for it.”

“For thinking it? Or telling me about it?”

“Both. It feels like I’m rubbing it in. And it feels like I’m just going to make it harder for you.” 

She’s strong, she’s so strong, but he can hear the slight crack in her voice, and that’s hard, because she won’t admit it but he knows that she struggles as much as he does. Prison, they’ve found out, isn’t just a punishment for him. She’s trapped as much as he is. 

It’s a cycle they both try to avoid. There’s nothing they can do about it, and the separation is punishment enough. There’s no point in her dragging his guilt through the world with her for added torture, they’ve both agreed. But he knows it’s hard, because he does the same thing, turning the hurt of her going home to a quiet house by herself over in his heart until it twists him up and he spends fitful nights staring at the ceiling and feeling like shit. He hates it for him, and it’s the last thing he wants for her. 

So he says, “tell me.” 

Donna hesitates for a moment, but then she starts listing the places she’s seen, places she wants to show him, and her voice takes on the particular tone it does when she’s talking about the future, all bittersweet and promise and wistfulness, and he smiles quietly against the handset. 

She tells him about new jazz bars opening over the top of old ones, of delis, of burger joints boasting the best brioche buns in the city. She tells him about a new whisky joint, half shop and half tasting bar, and they serve good bar food as well. She tells him about streets she’s walked down for the first time with beautiful buildings, art deco and stucco, and he forgets himself for a time in the picture she’s painting of the place he’s desperate to get back to. 

She continues until the 30 second warning breaks through, and he hears himself sigh, because 15 minutes always goes too quickly when he’s wrapped up in the future she’s imagining for them. 

Donna pauses, unsure how to finish the plans and hopes she’s been unspooling, and settles for, “I miss you, Harvey.”

He thinks _fucking hell, you have no idea_ , but he says “I miss you too,” and the phone clicks off halfway through her telling him she loves him. 

**Touch**

He enters the visiting room once she’s seated, and he can feel his soul drawing towards her, and he can see her, vibrating with the need to reach out and touch him, not just skin but soul.

He’s in front of her in a moment, his arms around her a moment later. She’s warm and real and solid and she adjusts gravity around him. He feels himself let a relieved breath out, his belly shifting against her sternum. You’re here, he says into her hair. He says it whenever she visits, and he’s not sure why. He’s probably still counting his blessings. 

I’m here, she says, and kisses him. 

The only time he’s not thinking about kissing her is when he gets to, once every couple of weeks, at the start of their visit. They push the moment as far as they can without breaking any rules and risking his visitation rights, but even under the threat of not being able to see her it’s hard not to do more than press his bottom lip in between hers and let his tongue slide against hers lightly. His hands tighten around her waist as she slips her hands around his shoulders, and he draws her against him for a second, but the full body press of her against him just makes it more difficult to pull away. 

His hand slips up to tangle in her hair for just a moment before he breaks away and pulls back from her, and his breathing is heavier than it should be. 

He can see his everything in her expression. 

He can also tell from the way she smiles that and the way he can’t quite focus that his eyes are slightly dazed. He knows, knows he’s looking at her like everything around them isn’t walls and wire and separation - he’s looking at her like he looked at her the first night in his office when she kissed him and he’s looking at her like they’re about to walk right out of here, walk into a new life, walk down an aisle. 

The back of his mind is impressed that she can still turn him off to the world around him so quickly, even after all these years. 

They don’t talk much, when they visit. They talk on the phone and in letters, almost every day, and so when he sees her, he just wants to drink her in lightly in the silence. They sit opposite each other because they have to, backs rigid against metal stools and the steel of a small table between them. 

He leans across the table unconsciously, minimising the distance between them, and his hand slips out to hers. His fingers press in between hers, and he tries not to let the spark of that settle too deep in his stomach. 

She squeezes lightly, and then slides her fingers free from his and pushes them up over his forearm, slipping fingertips under the cuff of his shirt. Harvey turns his hand so he can cup her forearm in his palm, and she’s light and warm and he’s not sure how she’s managing to translate every thought she’s had of pressing her skin against his to him just by letting her arm rest against his fingers, but she is and he has to work really hard not to pull her onto the table and embarrass them both. 

He looks at her, and she looks at him, unblinking, and how does she say everything she’s thinking without saying a damn word. She looks at him like she has since he first met her, intelligent and imaginative and breathtakingly gorgeous, shot through with a clarity that he’s always relied on, and he can see clearly the promise of the whole goddamn future in her. The whole fucking thing. He’s never bought into the idea that time can shift, that it can stop when something important happens, but whenever she lets her fingers fall against him he thinks he’s wrong about that. 

No wonder he proposed to her the first time she visited him. If he hadn’t done it already he would have done it now. 

He’s so absorbed in her eyes and touch that it takes a full fifteen minutes for him to say, hey, and it comes out so guttural he’s almost embarrassed. 

She says, hi, and it’s the same, and he thinks, well, at least she’s also thinking about dragging him onto the table and tearing his clothes off. 

She talks to him then, about Ray and the trip up, but he doesn’t. He’s memorising her again, because there’s something about the walls around him that blur the details. So he watches, and he tucks away all her details, like how she talks with her hands, slender fingers knocking the air aside while she talks about Rachel and the latest tussle her and Mike are in over their distant wedding plans. Or the way her hair falls however it likes when she absentmindedly threads her fingers through it, shaking her fringe away from her scalp. Or the scattering of freckles peeking through her makeup because it’s summer and the sun has teased them into prominence on her skin. 

All of it adds up to how much he loves her. 

He fucking hates it when she leaves, and she kisses him like she can’t figure out if she should kiss him like she’ll see him in a couple of weeks or like she’ll never see him again. 

_Year Two_

**Words**

He writes every week. 

At first, his letters come printed from the library computer, spell checked, edited and formatted with a cleanliness that she can tell he’s tried to pull into his thoughts. They’re streamlined and efficient. Donna can almost imagine him sitting at his desk at the firm, filling out a three piece suit and writing to her like he’s writing to a client he’s trying to stop from worrying. Donna has proofed enough of his letters to know when he’s hiding, and when he first writes the second time he’s in, he’s hiding. Not lying, not exactly. He’s just fudging the details enough so that he thinks he’s keeping the worst back from her, admitting just enough to look like he’s baring his soul even though he’s just showing his scars. 

She writes back. She tells him that she’s not his client and he’s not her lawyer. She tells him it’s okay if he hates every solitary second of his existence as long as he’s honest about it. 

The next letter after that, and the ones after, come handwritten, and she can see him and feel him unstitching himself onto the page, painful and halting. There are words crossed out and replacement words crossed out as well. He scribbles in the margins and bumps extra paragraphs into the spaces he left after full stops. Sometimes he addendums entire pages with post-its when he looks back over his words and thinks he could have said something more, or less, or better. There are full stops that sit heavily indented against the paper, where he’s leant down on the pen and tried to figure out what he’s trying to say before he continues. 

It’s like watching him growing into new skin in front of her, fleshing maturity out over paper like it’s happening in real time, all mess and u-turns and experiments, and his handwriting reminds her of a teenager in a remedial English class who’s been held back at least once.

But she loves him for it. She loves him for his scattered thoughts, for his brain, his flashes of humour. She loves his bare bones and his raw words.

__

**Voice**

He calls, and she can hear him in love with her, sitting under the tightness in his voice. 

He’s more guarded on the phone than he is in his scribbled pages, but she knows the line of inmates behind him makes him throw his walls up, and Harvey is private, so the idea that his words are being recorded makes him suspicious. 

His voice, though. His voice tells her everything. She can hear every move of his body in his breath and the way he ends his sentences. She can feel him leaning against the booth, handset pressed against his shoulder, in the way his register muffles out just a little. She knows when he’s got his head ducked into the collar of his shirt because that makes him draw out against the lowest register in his voice. He doesn’t laugh out loud much, but she knows his eyes are crinkling at the edges when he huffs into the speaker after a joke or after she calls Mike an idiot. 

She knows he shuffles his feet when she tells him she loves him, because he does that anyway. One day he might stop. When he gets used to it. But he talks to her like he’s in awe, like he’ll never get used to it. He’s not surprised by it, she knows, just… aware of it. Aware of how they almost missed it. It’s like his subconscious has determined never to see her and him and them as a given, which is okay because she doesn’t think she will either. 

She knows his hopes in the way he talks about when he’s out. He talks about it like people talk about the concept of tomorrow, concrete but horizoned, like it’s only ever a moment away but also like he fears it might never come. 

But mostly she just loves his voice, gravel and pitch and husky warmth saved just for her.

“Hey,” he says, when she’s accepted the charges. 

“Hey.”

“Miss you.” It’s something he always says as soon as he can. It’s almost like he’s afraid she’ll think he’s okay without her.

“Miss you too. Have you committed any crimes today?”

“Just eight. How are Mike and Rachel?”

“They’re good. Planning their wedding, now you have a release date. They’ve found a venue and they’re trying to narrow down the guest list. They still think it’s important that Rachel’s third cousin she hasn’t seen in 6 years has a plus one. They’re so young, Harvey.”

“They’re stupid,” he says, but she can hear the affection.

“They’re cute. They miss you. Rachel’s always asking after you.” 

“Tell her to come out with you next time you visit. It’d be nice to see her. Tell her to bring me a bagel.”

“I will.” She pauses. “And you?” They slide into the shorthand code they’ve developed over years of working side by side that has nothing to do with their words and everything to do with pauses and timbre and the breaths between sentences. “How are you doing?”

There’s a pause before he says “I’m okay,” and the pause means he isn’t really. “Some days are better than others. I found some interesting casework in the library that just came in. A couple of the guys are letting me help them prepare their parole hearings. Their lawyers are fucking idiots. So I’m keeping busy.”

He fills her in on his week, and she’s used to the repetition by now. There’s never much different - a parade of repeated activity, of meals and shifts at the laundry where he works, of conversations with the two or three inmates he’s friendly enough with to discuss the way the food sucks that week. 

She always feels a relief when she talks to him. He’s still holding on to his gentleness. It’s buried under his jokes and his news but it’s there, and that’s when she misses him the most. She misses his boldness, his out loud way of loving her and his brain. She misses how assertive he is, she misses his passion and his laugh and his easy way with people. But she also misses the parts of himself he’s unfolding - his shy smile and his touch, the way his body sits heavy and warm against hers, the way he says _I love you_ like he’s still a little surprised by it. 

She misses him so much that she lies awake at night thinking about it. She’s not even thinking about him really, but about how missing him is almost as consuming as loving him. She misses him in her bed, and she misses him next to her when she sits down to dinner at the end of the night. She misses him ordering whisky and quirking his eyebrow at office gossip when she’s out for drinks. She misses him when her text alert buzzes on her nightstand but it’s Rachel and not him. 

But she misses him most when he’s on the phone because he’s so real but she can’t touch him.

She longs to touch him. She wants to feel him under her hands, to press the gentle creases of laughter and stress that live next to his eyes under her fingertips, to remind herself that he’s real and made of flesh and blood and not a figment of her imagination. She wants to draw his clothes off, not to pull him into her but to press him into the shower or the bath, to make him clean and fresh, to remind herself of what he smells like when he’s used his own shampoo and soap, to slot him back into her world where he belongs. 

Fifteen minutes is up too early. “I have to go,” Harvey murmurs after the 30 second warning breaks into their conversation. “Talk to you tomorrow? I won’t have anything new to say but it’ll be fun to say it.” 

She smiles and there’s a flutter at the spark of fight in his humour. They talk everyday, write every week; she drives up every fortnight. It’s often enough that they retread conversations over and over, but she doesn’t mind. 

“I’ll call,” she says. There’s a bizarre gut instinct she has to indulge in ridiculous pet names, to call him _honey_ or _baby_ or other nonsense they’ve never done and never will do because they can say each other’s names a hundred different ways and it’s all they’ll ever need. But she can feel the pull to layer her speech with hyperbole. So that he’ll know that she loves him. 

He reads her turned over thoughts in her hesitation. 

“I know,” he murmurs, “I love you too,” and the line clicks off. 

**Touch**

It’s the last time she’s ever coming back to this god forsaken parking lot. It’s the last time, and this time she hasn’t had to worry about the clothes she’s picked working within the guidelines stamped above the entry to the visitors room. She doesn’t have to be searched, and questioned, she doesn’t have to sign anything and she doesn’t have to feel the nervous certainty of watching eyes on her while she tries to fight her way to him. 

It’s the last time in this parking lot, because this time it’s him coming out and not her going in. 

It feels unreal, like a dream, it feels like it’s been years and it feels like it’s been seconds. Time has played with them both over the last two years since he walked into Gibbs’ office. They were both different people then. She misses who he was but she also doesn’t. He’s different, but she thinks he’s better now. She’s different as well, and, she thinks, stronger. Steadier. It’s amazing how confidence settles in your atoms when you finally know the person you love loves you back, she thinks. Harvey hasn’t completed her, not really. He’s just let her uncover something of herself she’d had to hide for too long. 

And then he steps out. 

He steps out, finally, from behind razor wire and cinder blocks, and he smiles, and all the air floods back into the world. 

He’s got his suit on, the one he went in wearing, and it sits a little loose around the torso, a little tight around the arms, but it fits. He’s cut his hair and trimmed his beard and he looks for all the world like he’s come back from a week in London or Chicago and not like he’s been holding onto the scraps of his world for two years. He’s smiling, and it finally reaches his eyes. 

He looks like himself. 

They don’t talk. They don’t need to. He says everything with the way he drops the bag his wallet and keys have been stored in and scoops her up in a hug that feels like someone turning the warmth of summer on. 

Donna just smiles through tears and pushes her face into the side of his neck. She thinks he says he missed her, but she isn’t paying attention to anything beyond the pulse in his neck against her cheek and the way his shoulders flex under her arms. 

She’d almost gotten used to Harvey in pieces. Harvey in one piece in his letters, in another on the phone, and another sitting across a table from her while his hands twitched towards her and his eyes pooled with patience and need. 

Harvey combined and pressed back together is overwhelming. 

He sets her down, eventually, but his eyes don’t leave hers. He’s looking at her like he can’t quite believe she’s real, and his hand slides to find her fingers. He doesn’t let go, and she thinks he probably won’t for a while. 

She tugs him lightly towards the car, and he grabs up his bag while greeting Ray, and his voice is thick with whatever combination of emotions flood through you when you’ve just been released from prison, but he doesn’t take his eyes off her. He stares, hooded eyes and pupils wider than they should be, and that kicks something low in her gut. 

Ray has the good sense to have the privacy screen up when Donna slides into the back seat, and it’s a smart decision because the door is barely shut before Harvey has her pressed up against the window, his mouth on hers, and she can taste two years of patience and frustration on him, two years of waiting and fantasy and long nights staring at the ceiling and thinking about them.

It probably shouldn’t turn her on as much as it does, she thinks distantly, being able to taste all that on him, but then he slides his tongue against her teeth and pushes a hand under her to pull her flush against him and that’s the last thing she thinks at all for several long minutes. 

It’s just over an hour from Danbury to his place, and they don’t talk for a moment of it. They’ve talked already. They’ve had almost nothing but talking for two years, in letters and phone calls and visits, and the undercurrent in every sentence has been _when can I touch you_ and now here they are, touching, and words aren’t enough. Never have been. So they alternate touches and kisses and the silent communication of forehead on forehead and palm on palm, and she’s not sure anything before this moment has ever mattered, not really. 

They make it to Harvey’s apartment and up the elevator into the entrance without embarrassing themselves or Ray, but only just, and Donna is silently thankful she thought to visit the day before to make sure the bed was freshly made and there was coffee creamer in the fridge.

Harvey doesn’t notice the lack of dust and the way Donna has aired the apartment out for him because as soon as the door is closed he’s got her backed up against the wall. 

He looks almost dangerous, the lust vibrating in him punching through his gaze and blowing his pupils wide and black. Donna’s hands are at his waist, undoing the buttons on his jacket so she can slide it over his shoulders and drop it behind him, and she has to finish pulling it off him blind because he nudges his nose over her mouth, tipping her head back and kissing her, slowly and thoroughly and with a dizzying combination of lust and patience that makes goosebumps chase themselves up her spine. It’s been two years nearly, and he feels like every fantasy she’s had since he went in, only with the reality of weight and skin and bone added in, and it’s almost too much. 

He slips a hand up to trace the length of her neck, sliding fingertips over her collarbone before following the same trail with his tongue, flushing cool against her skin, and goddammit, she thinks, he’s going to kill her. 

She cups his jaw, tickling fingers through scruff, and pulls her mouth to his, kissing him for a long, languid moment, but her skin is in a quiet protest for _more_ and _now_ and _harder_ and she can feel them both trapped somewhere between the need to fold hours away in slow exploring and renewing and relearning each other and the need to just have him sink inside her and break that last two-year barrier down between them. 

In the end, neither wins and they live in the in-between of patience and impulse. It makes them mix the exquisite and infuriating and it’s where they’ve always been anyway since they first met and silently agreed to waste years pushing each other in and out of limbo. So Harvey bites down on the side of her neck hard enough to crack the line between pleasure and pain while he slides his hand up to pull the zipper on her dress like she’s made of glass. Donna finds his hair gently under her fingers at the back of his neck while she yanks his shirt out from the back of his waistband and scratches firmly up his spine. 

By the time she’s got her fingers threaded through his and his palm pressed flush to her own so she can pull him into the bedroom, he’s down to his pants and she’s down to her bra and underwear, and she has to walk backwards because she doesn’t seem to be able to pull her eyes from his, and he’s not blinking while he follows her and raises her fingers to his mouth so he can tease his mouth over them one by one. 

Goddammit. He really is going to kill her. 

He walks her backwards until the back of her calves knock into his bedframe, and then keeps on, pressing himself over her as she lets him push her gently against the mattress. 

His weight. She’s dreamed about his weight, solid and sticking gravity against her, warm skin and heavy muscle. She pulls him against her, sliding hands over skin, her thumbs pushing over the slowly fading scars lining his torso - not disappearing, but just folding in to being part of him now, instead of something scratched over the top of his being. She’d been worried, quietly, that he would still sit uncomfortable in his own body, unsure and hesitant, that finding their physicality together would be work, fraught and slow and uncertain. 

She shouldn’t have worried. He’s clean and sure, sharply focussed on her. He’s looking at her like he can see every strand of her DNA sitting under her skin, and he’s not thinking about him. He’s thinking about her. 

He slips a hand up over her arm, teasing the strap of her bra down towards her elbow so he can lay his mouth over the ridge of her shoulder. Donna slides a hand over the back of his neck to edge him more solidly against her, her breath punching out harder than she expects when his teeth catch the edge of her collar bone. 

Harvey slides his hand under her to let her bra loose and she lifts her shoulders so he can pull it free, and she presses a kiss to his temple as she brings her arms up to cradle his head, because he’s beautiful, and because she loves him. She thinks she breathes his name against his jaw when he presses his hands over her breasts and catches her nipples against his palms but she’s not sure and anyway it gets swallowed by her throaty gasp. She pushes her hips against his instinctively, arching her back into him. He’s overwhelming, but he catches her mouth with his and grounds her with the slide of his tongue over hers even as he spikes her brain into mindlessness as he teases his thumbs over her and tweaks her nipples into taut buds. She catches her breath against his kiss and runs her hands down his back. 

He follows his thumbs with his tongue, tipping her head back so he can drag down the expanse of her neck and into her clavicle, and then down further, catching her lightly between his teeth and sliding his tongue against her nipple before pressing his mouth down and sucking, walking some infuriating line between light and firm, and as he does he settles his hips over hers and nudges her arms up over her head so he can drag an unbroken line with his fingers from her wrists down to her hips. 

Every touch sparks goosebumps and fire, and Donna can’t decide if it’s perfect or if she wants to kill him. Her fingers flex involuntarily into the air with the need to touch him or herself, she’s not sure, and she pushes her palms against her headboard for relief. 

He works both nipples under his tongue before working his way down, lips over her sternum and she can feel him smile when her breath heaves her skin against him. He rocks back on his knees, slipping lower, until his nose nudges over her hip bone. She drops a hand to his head and pushes her hand over his scalp and shoulders, watching him as he presses kisses into her inner thigh and she thinks watching him slip a hand between them to unbutton his pants might be the hottest thing she’s ever seen. He slides his fingers under her underwear and pulls them down and off, and then he works some kind of magic where he manages to pull his own pants off in the same movement, and by the time he settles back over her she can feel skin on skin and it’s all she’s ever wanted. 

She’s half expecting him to tease her for a while first, find the playfulness she knows will be a part of how they love and make love to each other, but it’s been two years for him as well, and he’s never been patient anyway, so instead she has to work hard to keep her breathing under control because he just rests his hands on her hips and presses his mouth over her clit. She can feel herself slick against him as he drags his tongue across her and his teeth catch her lightly. 

_Fuck._

She doesn't think she says out loud, but it’s the most coherent thought she can come up with because he’s got his lips and tongue on her, his teeth building a tight heat low in her belly, and then he presses his hands up her torso and back over her breasts and even that thought blinks into static. She has both hands on his head now, pressing him into her like there’s any risk he’d stop, guiding him over her as he pulls her into his rhythm. He slips one finger, then another, into her, curling his fingers up, exploring for a moment, before he presses just so and _there_ , and he knows because her hips push against him involuntarily and she moans low into the oxygen around them. 

It’s been so long since she’s been with him, been so long since she’s had anything more than her own fantasies and waking dreams about him that made her push her own fingers over and inside her until he spoke his name out into her pillows. It’s been so long that it’s only a minute before she’s coming apart around his mouth and his hand, muscles clenching around him as it ripples through her body and makes her arch up against him with a long, low moan.

Harvey rests his chin against her pelvic bone, breath tickling across her stomach, and he smiles lazily, watching her come back to her senses, smoothing his hands over her skin and dropping light kisses against her. 

She hooks her hand around the edge of his jaw and tugs, drawing him up over her body, and she kisses him, slow and languid, like they have all the time in the world, because finally, finally they do. 

Donna slips a hand down between them, pressing her palm along his torso, smoothing over his sweat slicked skin and over his belly. He breathes out slowly against her and leans his forehead into hers as she presses down and slips her hand along his cock, taking a moment to savour the feel of him under her fingers. She kisses along his jaw and strokes him in her hand firmly, but it’s been two years for him as well and it’s not long before he has to still her hand with his own because she can feel his body tensing and tightening. 

He pulls her hand to her side, slipping his fingers through hers, and squeezes her palm at the same time he shifts his hips up to hers and sinks into her in a slow, confident push, and two years vanish.

They both need a moment to adjust, Donna to let herself stretch and settle around him, and Harvey looks like any movement will tip him straight over the edge. So instead she rocks her body up to hug her arms around him, and Harvey rests his chin on the top of her head for a moment, slipping his hands over her back, and the press of the length of his body against hers is glorious. 

He pulls back, and his eyes catch hers, and he moves. He looks at her like the best thing in the world isn’t that he’s pressing himself inside her but that he has her eyes on him. He strokes, slow, and stares at her, and never manages to pick up speed, because something a lot bigger and wider is happening in that moment. 

Finally, at some point, he murmurs, _I love you_ in between slow kisses _,_ and she says it back, and it’s the first words she knows for sure that they’ve said to each other, but what more than that is needed. 

He falls apart, only a moment after her, and when he falls asleep, his body still over hers, his nose pressed into her cheek, and his hand tangled in her hair, she can only think one thought.

They’re whole.

**News**

“Harvey,” she says the next morning. 

“Mmm.” 

He’s on his stomach, his arm thrown out and draped over her waist. He’d shuffled away from her at some point in the night - sleeping with a full grown man on top of you is a romantic but impractical notion - but he’s tethered himself to her, fingers and skin across her. He’s been touching her almost constantly since he grabbed her up in the parking lot. He’s probably worried he’s lost his mind all together and is hallucinating freedom and her and their bed. 

He shifts his neck to turn his head towards her; he’s tousled and sleep drunk and he has a lazy smile creeping across his face as he cracks one eye open and she can see him give himself a moment to make sure he isn’t dreaming. His thumb flexes across her hipbone. 

“Morning,” he says, mostly gravel, pulling the word out across his vocal chords like he does when he’s waking up. 

“Morning. I have…” she thinks for the best word. “News.”

“News.” He quirks a sleep-heavy eyebrow at her. 

“I was going to wait, but.” She shrugs, minutely. She doesn’t know how to say that this is her favourite moment with him, maybe ever, and that this is her favourite version of him; lithe and stretched out from sex and from sleep, skin paler than it used to be but still dusky against white sheets, easy and lazy and … at peace, finally. “Seems like as good a time as any.” She kisses him, slow and lazy, and slips out of bed, stopping briefly to pull one of his old t-shirts from his drawers and tug it over her head. She smiles when she hears Harvey’s annoyed huff behind her - he likes the view, she knows. 

“If you tell me Mike is the new managing partner I’m going to drive back to Danbury,” he calls out after her, but he trails off when Donna comes back from shuffling through their discarded clothes in the entrance, kneels by his side of the bed, and holds out the ring that she’d bought almost eighteen months ago. 

It’s a simple, wide, silver band. 

He looks at it, then her. “Donna.”

“You’re shit at proposals,” she says, but she’s smiling and she can feel tears threatening. “In prison? Really.”

His eyes are shining, creasing at the corners, and he cups her jaw to pull her to him and kiss her. 

“Marry me,” she says against his lips. 

“Always,” he says. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Thank you for reading! I so appreciate all your reviews, responses, feedback and comments. So please leave a review - I value every single one.
> 
> Thanks again to Aditi (@mayxpaulsen), who proofread, drafted, beta'd, photoshopped letters because my skills can't keep up with my ideas, and basically made this chapter something I could never make it by myself.
> 
> \-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> For anyone screen reading, text for the letters is below:
> 
> Donna:
> 
> Harvey,
> 
> I’m at home and I’m thinking of you. I’m thinking of how it doesn’t make any sense that you’ve never lived here. You’ve never even stayed the night here, and yet it feels like there’s a huge gap in the air where you should be but aren’t. I wonder if it’s possible for me to miss someone so much that it makes the space around me feel empty even though it isn’t. I’ve signed a new lease, but we should talk about what to do when you’re back. I assume we won’t need two places. Yours or mine? Or somewhere new? One condition; we’re taking my sofa. Yours is uncomfortable and smaller it doesn’t make you look as sophisticated as you think it does. You can bring your desk and your whisky collection. 
> 
> Jessica asks after you, and Louis. They all miss you. We’re all just carrying on with life but we’re all waiting for you to be back in it. They’re all making plans for when you’re out. They keep asking me what you’re planning to do for work, but I’ve told them that will come. Don’t feel the pressure of that. I know it worries you because it worries them, but we’ll figure that out when the time comes. 
> 
> I thought waiting would get easier but it isn't. I miss you. I miss the space you take up, and I miss making space for you. I miss being able to look up at work and see you. I miss the way you tease Mike and I miss our inside jokes. I miss your laugh and your memos and I even miss not being able to read the memos you leave on my desk at lunch. 
> 
> And, happy anniversary. Del Posto called to confirm our reservation, and I took Rachel. I didn’t want to cancel it. She asked what you order and she ordered the same thing, but it wasn’t like having you there. But she helped. I kept the reservation for when you’re back. We’ll go again. 
> 
> I’ll call you soon. 
> 
> I love you. We’re okay, and it’s going to be perfect. 
> 
> Donna. x
> 
> Harvey:
> 
> Donna,
> 
> I miss you. I miss you like crazy in here. The warden told me it would get easier the longer I’m in but he was wrong. It’s like the closer I get to getting out the slower time everything moves. 
> 
> How slow everything is moving worries me. I hope this doesn’t change us. I know it’s changing me but I’m trying for it to be for the better. I have to be really hard in here. Firm. It worries me that I can turn everything off so easily*. 
> 
> I worry that I’m not going to be very good with people when I get out. I look at people like they’re threats now which I don’t think I used to do^. But I know it’ll be okay. You’ll kick my ass and I’ll get to where I need to be. 
> 
> ^Did I do that?
> 
> I’ve decided (I know it’s taken me forever. I’m working on the change thing), and I think we should look for a new place? Once our leases are up and I’ve figured out what to do for work. It’d be nice building something new with you. You can show me all the plans and real estate agents you’ve already spoken to. You can bring your sofa even though mine is better. 
> 
> Mom called last week. She’s insisting we come to visit as soon as I’m out. She says she wants to see you again but I’m pretty sure her and Marcus just want to kick the shit out of me for not getting my act together with you sooner. I said we’d figure out a date when I’m home. 
> 
> It’s good to think talk about after. It’s good to be able to think past all this. I was scared to for a long time. It used to be when I thought about the future it was just walls but now I feel like I can think about you instead. I wanted you to know before I run out of space. I think about you all the time. You keep me sane in here, thinking about you. I wanted you to know. You’re everything. All of it. I want to thank you for everything. 
> 
> H x
> 
> \------------
> 
> *I know I do that anyway but it used to be harder. - and it’s hard not having you here to remind me when I’m being shitty. 


	11. 11

Harvey’s barely answered his phone in two weeks. 

He’s had a couple of conversations with Mike and with Jessica, about work and the firm, and there’s no easy answers there, but he doesn’t care. He’s spoken with Louis about his parole and his conditions of release, but he doesn’t care about that either. He talks to his mom, which feels important, because he hasn’t seen her yet since they pressed past all the gaps and barriers of the last two decades in a hospital room a couple of hours away, and they’ve come a long, long way since then, though there’s still work to do. But even when he’s talking to her there’s a part of him just waiting for the goodbye.

Because none of it matters except for her. 

None of it matters except for Donna. 

Part of him thinks, he’s a grown man, and he should be able to focus and multi-task, and worry about his career alongside his relationship, but he… doesn’t.

Donna has taken a couple of weeks off work, and she doesn’t worry about her job either. 

So their phones sit, forgotten, in drawers or under blankets or wherever they’ve left them, and instead Harvey indulges every instinct he’s had since he locked eyes with her across a crowded bar an eternity ago and just loses himself in her. He dresses in jeans or track pants or in nothing at all, and he’s in no hurry to remind himself what pulling on a suit every day is like. They live on delivered pizza and strong black coffee, on wine and laughter. They fall into bed as soon as it’s dark enough to justify the decision and they make love in the late evening. He wakes up in the hours between night and morning and pulls her in with kisses and touches, and they breathe each other in. They sleep late, arms and legs tangled together, pushing comforters back as the sun warms the room and their skin.

Sometimes, she’ll stir in the early morning, pressing herself out of bed, murmuring about yoga and trying not to let her gym schedule slip, but he’ll reach a hand out to curl around her wrist, and tug gently, letting her name rasp over sleep-ruined vocal chords. And then Donna will slip back in with him, pressing her skin against his, and he’ll let his arm drape heavy over her waist and slide back into dreams and he thinks that’s his favourite part, just letting the morning watch them sleep. 

They keep talking each other into going out, into going for dinner or to a show, and Harvey thinks he needs to find his way back into the world, but then Donna will emerge from the bathroom wearing the dress she’s chosen, and Harvey will be halfheartedly buttoning his jeans, and he’ll look up and see her, and it’s like the whole world stutters to a halt. He’s spent years alone in a cinderblock room dreaming of her, and seeing her in front of him doesn’t feel real anymore. He wonders if it ever will. He won’t mind if it doesn’t. She’s stunning, she always is, and he doesn’t want to leave the house. He doesn’t want to share her with anyone. He’s not ready for that yet. So he pulls him against her and kisses her until he’s breathless and she’s laughing, and her dress never stays on long enough for them to pick a restaurant. 

Harvey’s never been married, and so he’s never had a honeymoon, but he imagines that this is what one would feel like. It’s breathless and perfect, the way he doesn’t have to do anything but be with her. Two weeks feel like a moment, and he wishes for an eternity of it. 

Something about being engaged, he thinks, has shifted things; properly engaged, not his stumbled clumsiness in a prison visiting room, but here and free, with a ring on his finger, having discussions about the near future that range from what colour suit he should wear for the ceremony to where they should live.

There’s one problem though, and it’s that those discussions fizzle out the moment they become more than hypothetical, and he can’t quite put his finger on why. It’s not contentious, and they’re not fighting, it’s just something they can’t quite seem to find their way through. They can’t make headway into dates, or venues, or guest lists, and it confuses him that he’s so indecisive about it, and he thinks he needs to do  _ something _ concrete. 

And that’s how Donna catches him, with his face leaned in slightly too close to his laptop screen, scrolling through engagement rings and trying to find one for her that he thinks will catch the sunlight in the same way she does. 

“What are you looking at?” she asks, fresh out the shower, wrapped in one of his robes and with her hair washed and gathered up in a messy bun. 

“Hmm? Nothing.” It’s a reflex, trying to hide his thoughts and plans from her, and his hand nearly reaches for the screen to close his computer, but they’re so far beyond secrets that there’s no point. She’d take one look at him and know anyway. 

She raises an eyebrow at him and bends down behind him to rest her chin on the slope of his shoulder. Harvey sighs and aims the laptop towards her, tweaking the screen against the brightness of the mid-morning sun. She looks at it over his shoulder and points at one, smiling into the curve of his neck. “That one. It’ll bring out your eyes.”

He smiles and brings his hand up to link his fingers through hers where they’ve fallen on the front of his chest. “They’re for you.”

“I figured.” She kisses his cheek, tickling her nose against the light beard he doesn’t feel like shaving yet. It’s unhurried, this new intimacy, light and deep at the same time and something he cherishes. He loves the passion that sits underneath everything between them, and he loves that the tension that’s always sparked between them hasn’t dissipated, but the gentle ease of being hers, and being able to brush a hand along her arm or kiss her quickly as he passes her a cup of coffee in the morning is a revelation. 

“Bit late, don’t you think?” Donna asks. “We’ve gotten engaged twice now and you’ve flamed out on having a ring both times.”

She’s joking, but it makes him think about how they don’t do anything in the way tradition dictates. They loved each other long and loudly before they let themselves admit it. They called each other at night and broke up with boyfriends and girlfriends for each other while they called themselves friends. They resigned from jobs and got fired to protect each other and then swore black and blue that they didn’t love each other that way. In the end it was the shotgun barrel of prison and not dating that snapped his brain into place and pushed him into her arms. And now he finds himself wearing an engagement ring rather than her, and that feels oddly fitting for two people who’ve done the opposite of the expected in every other area of their relationship as well. 

But Harvey is also starting to realise just how much like his dad he is. He also believes in love at first sight, like Gordon did. He just didn’t know it until he opened his eyes on one lazy morning and saw her, next to him, her arm thrown out, seeking him in her sleep, and he realised with a sudden clarity that he’d wanted to marry her since the second he’d met her. And he thinks that there are things that go along with that, things she deserves, and surely diamonds are one of them. 

He unconsciously flexes his right hand and feels the weight of the ring he’s wearing, and he wants so much for her to feel the same promise and hope that he feels from the weight of it on his finger. 

She reads him, reads his thoughts in the quiet moment he’s taking. “It’s okay that I don’t have one, you know,” she says.

“I just… it feels like. I don’t know.” He’s still shit with his words sometimes. 

Donna presses a light kiss into his shoulder blade. “You’re not letting me down.”

“That’s not it.” He can’t quite land on the right way to tell her how he’s pretty sure his heart physically expands when he sees her and that he wants everyone else to know, so he waves his hand instead. “I want to get you one.”  _ I want to give you everything _ . 

“I know. And you can, if you want. But there’s no hurry, Harvey. I have you. I have you back. I don’t care about anything else. All this?” She waves her hand at the laptop. “I like all this.” She brings her hand back, rests it on his chest, just near his heart, her thumb smoothing over his collar bone. “But I love this. This is what I want.”

“Honestly?”

“Honestly.” She tips his head back towards her and kisses him, slowly and thoroughly. She tastes of peppermint and smells like vanilla and he thinks his favourite thing about getting to be with her is seeing her like this, fresh from the shower, her skin bright and freckled, in robes and sweats and utterly, utterly beautiful. 

How he ever thought he could live with her as nothing more than a friend is beyond him. 

As she pulls back, she smiles and says, “also, you have terrible taste.”

Harvey looks back to the computer. “Hey, I thought these were nice,” he says, his voice somewhere between amused and indignant. 

“Which is exactly why I always buy my own presents.” Donna affectionately pinches his earlobe as she pads into the kitchen and rummages for coffee cups. “You can pick one up at Dana Walden if you’re determined. Take Rachel with you.”

“Rachel? She always manages to find the most expensive thing in the room.”

“Exactly. I’ve trained her well.” 

  
  


-

  
  


It’s been two weeks, just about, and the real world is looming. Donna’s going back to the office in a few days, and Harvey’s due to go in with her to catch up with Jessica and discuss … something. He isn’t sure what exactly. He assumes she’s pulled some kind of magic trick to let him stay at the firm, and he’s fending off a low level nervousness at the thought. He’s been in survival mode for two years, and then wrapped up only in Donna for the better part of a fortnight, and he’s realising that he’s not exactly sure what to do with the outside world anymore. 

It’s mostly curiosity about the world he’s been avoiding that makes him thumb through his wardrobe, one morning, while Donna’s making breakfast. Outside of the suit he’d worn to come home in, he hasn’t slipped on thousands of dollars worth of fabric and tailoring in a long time.

He pulls on a shirt, fumbling with the buttons on his cuffs for a long minute with fingers unused to the movement, and that feels like a bigger moment than it should, because he used to be able to do that while throwing back a cup of coffee, making a phone call, and mentally preparing briefs and depositions all at the same time. It’s tight around the shoulders and loose in the waist, and the  _ H.S _ stitched into the cuffs feels far too lavish after two years in badly fitting blue denim. 

His pants don’t quite fit either. The waist is slightly too loose, the legs feel too short after years in jeans he’s had to roll the cuffs on, and he’s definitely going to need a belt. He tries not to think too hard about how he feels like he looks the same but his clothes are saying otherwise. He doesn’t fit anymore. Not quite. His chest feels tight and it’s not just the shirt cutting in at his sternum. 

He pulls a jacket off its hangar anyway, and slips it up over his shoulders, stretching out his back and arms to settle it against him. It doesn’t fall perfectly like it used to and he can feel his shoulders pressing into the seams. 

He thinks,  _ I’m going to need to get all this tailored _ , and that thought feels so inconsequential that he’s surprised at how automatically it comes to him. 

He stands in front of the mirror, wearing a suit that doesn’t fit his body anymore, and maybe it doesn’t fit his insides either, his eyes automatically picking up on all the spaces it doesn’t sit right on him and the way the beard he still isn’t used to seeing changes everything as well, and he feels a wave of something that’s almost nausea. 

He takes a long, unsteady breath and punches it slowly out of his mouth. It shakes his lungs on the way in and his throat on the way out. 

Donna pads out of the living room then, with a cup of coffee in each hand, and she starts to smile at him, starts to make a joke, probably about the fact he’s not wearing sweats for the first time in over a week, but then she sees it in him, the creeping quiet that comes with him slipping too far into his own head. He’s never quite able to hide it from her. 

“You okay?” she asks, dropping the cups on his side table. 

“Just... seeing what this looks like,” he says, watching himself shrug into the mirror. 

He hates staring at his own face. He looks a lot more haunted than he thinks he should.

Donna sees his fingers twitching shakily against his palm and slips her hand into his, squeezing lightly to still his nervous energy. 

“Hey,” she says softly, tugging his hand and turning him to face her. “Talk to me.”

He fights the instinct to duck his head and break eye contact with her. Talking to Donna has always been second nature to him, and he’s honest with her now as well, but he still has to choose not to pull away sometimes, and she still nudges her thumb over his knuckle to encourage him when he chooses honesty. 

“I don’t know if I’m ready to go back,” he says, and his voice sounds a lot less steady coming out of him than it did in his head. 

“To work?”

He’s quiet for a moment, considering his response. He’s more careful with his words, these days. He’s spent far too many years using words as a barrier instead of a bridge but he’s decided that he’s not doing that anymore. Not with her, at least.

“Yes. No. Not just work. I’ve changed a lot.” He waves a hand vaguely out the window. “I don’t know how everything out there is going to feel.”

Donna looks at him silently for a moment. She slips her hand up along his forearm, her thumb catching under his cuff, warming his skin with hers. “The things everyone loves about you aren’t different, Harvey. Mike and Rachel and Jessica? None of us are going anywhere.” 

He’s not quite sure how to say that he’s not worried about them. Because he’s worried about himself. He’s been in a completely different world for two years, two years that somehow felt like ten. He's spent two years just hoping reality would look the same when he got out and he’s not sure that it does. 

He trusts his friends. They’ve stuck by him and he’s certain they’ll stay by him. He’s not worried that the world doesn’t have space for him any more. He’s worried that he’s such a different shape that he just won’t fit into it. 

Pulling on suits that don’t sit on his frame quite the same way they used to feels too close to the fear hammering in the hollow of his chest and he doesn’t know what to do with that.

Donna smoothes her hands over his chest, pressing his lapels down lightly. It’s automatic, affectionate, just like she’s done in his office a thousand times before. His hands land instinctively on her waist as she does, and he thinks distantly about all the other thousand times where he’d had to press his thumbs against his fingers to still the same instinct and he’d just helplessly wish for the feel of her under his palms instead. 

He told himself more than once, lying in his prison bunk with his hands laced behind his head, that he’d never ever ignore his instincts for her again. So as he settles his hands on her waist he leans in and kisses her, and she kisses him back with the light and casual certainty of somebody kissing their forever, and he remembers again how worth all this is if it all adds up to her. 

She pulls back, tips his head towards her so she can kiss his forehead, and says, “let’s just start easy.”

Harvey drifts his fingertips along her forearm to her wrist and ducks his head a little further to kiss her knuckles. He hums a yes against her skin. 

“Let’s invite our parents over for dinner.”

Harvey is pretty sure one of his eyebrows punches right up into his hairline. “You call that ‘starting easy’?”

“My mom and dad both love you, Harvey, and you’re way too old to be scared of having dinner with your fiance’s parents. Let’s bring them around. We’ll cook something easy and tell them the news and you can get used to small talk again.”

He’s quiet. Things are still new with Lily, and he hasn’t spoken to her parents since he was convicted. He thinks he and Clara would be okay, but Jim’s only ever just barely tolerated him, even before everything that’s happened since he last saw him. 

Donna links her fingers in his and squeezes his hand. “They know why you did what you did. They’re not going to hold the last two years against you.”

“Nobody wants their daughter marrying a criminal, Donna.”

“Nobody sees you that way. Hey.” She tugs on his collar, nudges her lips over his, kisses her faith for him and her family against his mouth. “They know you did it to save me and Mike and the firm. They love you. They do.” 

Harvey trusts Donna, and so he trusts she’s right. But he’s still him, so instead of admitting she’s right he tips his head to the side and juts his chin out. 

She laughs at his self indulgent pout, and kisses his cheek softly. “It’s going to be fine,” she says. “Now get over yourself and go call Lily. And take the suit off. I like you better in sweats.” 

  
  


-

  
  


As usual, Donna’s right, and her parents love him. 

Donna’s fussing with snacks when the doorbell rings, so she pushes Harvey down the entrance to answer the door for them both. He looks at her with what he’s sure is poorly hidden terror, and she sympathetically pats his hip as he fiddles nervously with the collar on his dress shirt before nudging him away gently and towards the door. 

He takes a steadying breath as he opens the door, but doesn’t even get the word ‘hi’ out before Clara has him wrapped in a hug that makes him feel like a long lost son. Jim follows with a warm handshake and a ‘thank you’ that Harvey isn’t sure he should ask for clarification on. 

Jim and Clara fall all over him with questions and excited comments about seeing him again, and it’s almost overwhelming until Donna slips against his side, her arm finding its way around his waist, and she runs interference for him with the deft patience of a daughter who’s had to balance over-eager parents for many years. Donna steers the conversation to her own work and running gags from her adolescence and Harvey leans into her lightly as a thank you. 

Lily arrives a few minutes later and hugs Harvey and Donna together for a long moment, and a couple of years ago he’d have laughed himself out of the room just for daring to imagine a moment like this, and he thinks that if this is what normal feels like now, then it’s something he can get used to. 

They share dinner, and stories, and Clara and Lily are instantly thick as thieves, scheming over plans to remodel Harvey’s apartment to be more suitable for the grandchildren they’ve spontaneously decided will be shortly forthcoming. Harvey laughs along at the same time that he steals a nervous glance at Jim and then at Donna, but Donna squeezes his knee under the table, quirking an eyebrow at him, and he’s quietly thankful they’ve never really needed words to communicate because there’s a silent  _ don’t panic, they’re joking and we’re fine  _ sitting under the amusement in her voice as she tells them Harvey has to keep his cactus alive before they can discuss anything further. 

They meander their way through dinner. Donna’s giggling with her mother over wine and rummaging in the fridge for dessert, and Jim is examining the skyline in the fading dusk, when Lily takes her handbag and Harvey’s hand and pulls him aside into the bedroom. 

“Have you picked a date?” she asks, and it’s so out of the blue that he has to take a moment to blink his surprise down. 

“Have I what?” he asks.

She points at his right hand, and at the ring Donna had slipped on his finger a handful of days ago. “I know an engagement ring when I see one, Harvey,” Lily says. “So. Stop stalling and tell me. Have you planned anything yet?”

“We’ve tried. Talked about it a little. We haven’t decided anything yet. We’re ... taking it slow.” 

Lily shakes her head at him. “You’re an idiot, Harvey.”

He’s not sure if he should be offended or amused at that, so he just shrugs instead, and he feels a smile tugging at his mouth. “Yeah. People keep telling me that.”

“Do you love her?”

He says, “yes,” and he thinks about how inadequate a word it is for how he feels. 

“Do you plan on loving her forever?”

“Of course.” It’s a redundant question. He’s already loved her as long as he’s known her and he doesn’t think he could do anything else whether he was planning to or not. 

“Then stop screwing around, Harvey. You’ve both waited long enough.”

“But… I haven’t had time to organise anything. I haven’t got an officiant or a venue or rings and I haven’t organised any guests... “ 

He trails off, because even as he says it, the sheer unimportance of it strikes him. He doesn’t want hundreds of guests. He doesn’t want handwritten invites and a registry, three course meals and speeches. Spectacle was him, once, maybe. But it isn’t anymore, and Lily is right. He doesn’t want any of that. 

He just wants Donna. 

Lily looks at him, and she knows. “How long will it take to get the people you need here?” she asks. 

“Maybe an hour.”

It’s just Mike, and Rachel, Jessica, and Louis, he knows. He realises how simple it all is at the same time that he realises why Donna and him have tried, over the last couple of weeks, to plan, and each discussion has fizzled out. It’s not that they don’t want to get married. Harvey’s spent nights dreaming of marrying her, dreams that were so vivid that he’d wake up feeling confused that the hand he slid across the bed to connect his skin with hers didn’t carry the soft weight of a wedding band. He wants to marry her with a depth of confidence and impatience he’s never felt, and Harvey is a confident and impatient man. Their conversations fizzle not because they don’t want to get married, but because it’s actually the exact opposite. 

He loves her so much that the effort of venues and guest lists feels absurd. He doesn’t give a shit. He just doesn’t. He just wants to be married to her. 

_ Holy shit. This is actually going to happen _ , he thinks. 

“I definitely need rings though,” he says. “Donna doesn’t give a shit about being able to choose between chicken or fish but she’s definitely not going to let me get away with not having a ring.”

“I can help with that,” Lily says. She ducks into her handbag, rummaging for a moment before holding a small, simple box out to him. 

Harvey takes it and flips it open, and a flood of memories crack in his chest. 

His grandmother’s ring. 

He remembers it in the amber glow of childhood memories, remembers the constant of her hands in Sunday visits and sleepovers. He remembers her ring, dusty and floured, as he stood next to her in the kitchen while she snuck him offcuts from babka and the browned edges of honey cake as she cut it up. He remembers Passover, the yiddishisms she’d pepper her language with when she tutted at him for sliding down the hallway with stocking feet. He remembers acceptance, and love, and safety, and how she taught him to laugh freely and wholeheartedly. 

Donna’s completely different to his grandmother, but she makes him feel as safe and accepted and loved as he felt as a kid, and it’ll be fitting, he thinks, to slip a ring onto his wife’s finger that reminds him of how she pulled him back to all of that joy. 

“Thanks, mom,” he says, and his voice stutters over his vocal chords as he pockets the box, and he has to press the back of his hand to his mouth because he will  _ not _ ruin the evening by bursting into tears in front of his growing family. 

“What about you?” Lily asks.

“I can get Mike to pick something up for me on the way,” Harvey murmurs, mostly to himself. He’s got the ring Donna’s already given him, sitting on his right ring finger, but they’d talked about a second one. Donna couldn’t care less about tradition and which of them has two rings, and he thinks that he wants the one he’s already wearing to remind him just of that morning, of her kneeling in front of him and asking him to be hers. 

“You could,” Lily agrees. “Or you could use this.” She holds out another ring, and this one isn’t in a box, just wrapped in tissue paper, wrinkled and worn from being folded and unfolded again and again. It’s silver, thin and simple and inexpensive, but it catches Harvey’s breath in his lungs like he’s been punched. 

_ Dad _ , he thinks.  _ Oh my god. Dad. _

He takes it with a shaking hand, runs it between the tremor in his fingers. A year ago, he couldn’t have held it. A year ago, he wouldn’t even have been able to talk about it. It would have reminded him too much of the hurt and failure and anguish that had haunted his life, too much of all the things he’d run away from, and the way he couldn’t, just  _ couldn’t _ understand the grace and patience his dad always held out towards Lily. 

“Mom…” The question he hasn’t got the breath for hangs in the air between them. 

“He always kept it,” Lily answers anyway, and her voice settles into something bittersweet. “He always loved us all, Harvey, and he didn’t regret anything. He wanted me to have it, and he wanted you to have it, when you were ready.” 

Harvey runs his thumb along the band, worn with time and nicked where his dad knocked it into his saxophone over years of gigs and recording sessions. It’s the ring he remembers from the joy of his growing up and from the pain of his adulthood and it’s heavy with his dad’s spirit. 

“I don’t know, mom,” he says. 

“I know. And you don’t have to use it. You can do whatever with it. But he wanted you to have it. And I’m sorry I didn’t give it to you before now.”

“Well, I wasn’t exactly in the right place to handle this before,” Harvey says, painfully aware that the gap between them was started by her but widened by him. “What about Marcus?”

“You’re the eldest. And Marcus didn’t have the bond you two did.” She looks like Harvey feels like he probably looks like as well - hopeful and grateful and torn in half that it came before Gordon could see it, that forgiveness and reconciliation came so long after they’d placed him in the ground. That Lily had been reaching out to him for years and that it had taken him so long to reach back, and if it wasn’t for Donna maybe he never would have in the first place. 

He doesn’t know if he has what it takes to wear it.

Because it’s all of it - all the hope of what could have been and all the weight of decisions made and regretted. It’s all the love Gordon held and all the promises kept or unsaid or unreciprocated. It reminds him of the way his dad loved. 

And he loved like nobody else Harvey had ever known, other than Donna. He loved fiercely, and brightly, and without hope or need for return. He loved with his whole heart when nobody around him deserved it. He loved Lily when she was unworthy of it and he loved Harvey when he threw hurt in the road between them. He loved his family with commitment and joy and he loved them with the seasons shifting, loved them unchanging when everything around him changed. He loved like people who love at first sight do. 

Gordon loved his family like Donna loves him.

Gordon loved in his life the way Harvey hopes he can love, one day. And, he thinks, there’s something in the spirit sitting in that worn silver band that says something about the ways he’s learning to walk and think and hold himself. 

Loyalty, not as a two way street, but instead a simple constant, undemanding of return. 

He looks up from his dad’s ring, frustratedly blinking back tears, and Lily pulls him into a hug, and he feels grounded and put back together in a way he hasn’t in decades.

He’s finally home, and he has a question he has to ask Jim. 

-

Donna’s pouring herself a second glass of wine and just starting to wonder where Harvey’s disappeared off to when he suddenly materialises at her side, bumping his shoulder lightly into hers and landing his palm at the small of her back. 

“Hey you,” he says innocently, and she narrows her eyes at him a little. There’s a glint in them that she remembers from when he was in his early days at the firm and spent most of his time coming up with ways to torture Louis. She’s seeing more and more of that lately, the Harvey she remembers from before a constant survival mode - the Harvey she first fell in love with, years ago, over drinks and friendly dinners and light hearted flirting. She loves the new Harvey that he’s been digging up and digging out, honest and thoughtful and reflective. But she loves the Harvey who doesn’t hesitate to slip his credit card out to pay for A1 printouts of Louis’ mugshot or for a tradesman to bolt his office door shut, and then explain to Louis that it was necessary because of ‘termites’ while swallowing back the smile that reaches his eyes. 

She loves the Harvey who sits waiting and smiling at her desk in the morning with a cup of coffee for her that’s sweetened to the point of being a health risk. She loves him in the way he kicks his head back when he laughs, or the way he ducks his smile into his chest when he’s trying to hide it, and the way his eyebrows have a mind of their own half the time. She remembers every moment of his easy humour and stupid pranks and movie quotes. 

That’s when she first realised she didn’t love him but that she was in love with him, a year or so after they started working together, when she realised she remembered everything he did with a particular clarity she hadn’t experienced before, and that every moment she remembered made her smile into her daydreams. 

She especially remembers the smile he gets when he’s about to try and pull off something outrageous, and he’s trying to hide it now. 

“Hey,” she says, suspicion colouring her voice. “You okay?” 

“Yeah. I’m good.” He pauses for a moment, and the grin he’s been tucking away slips onto his face. “I have something I wanted to ask.”

“Mmm? What’s that?” 

“How about today?”

“How about today what?” 

“How about today?” he says again, and then he’s suddenly on one knee in front of her, her hand pressed between both of his, and he’s looking at her like she’s the only thing in the whole world.

She breathes out, but she might be saying  _ oh my god _ . She’s not sure. 

“I just. I don’t want to set a date and find a place and pick a menu,” he says. “I don’t care. I just don’t. I don’t want to waste anymore time. I want to marry you. Our parents are here, it’s a perfect evening, and I can get everyone else here in an hour. This is our home. Let’s just do it. I’m sick of not being married to you.”

She’s not quite sure if he tugs her hand or not, but then she’s kneeling too, because they’ve always balanced each other out, stood together and lifted each other up and it feels right to be at his level now. She cups his jaw, smiles into him, and what can she do but kiss him, her fingers in his hair, and everything is exactly as it’s meant to be. 

“So, yes?” he murmurs against her lips. 

She bumps her forehead against his. “Yes.”

-

  
  


Things fall in quickly the way they do when Donna takes charge. Within an hour, Harvey’s living room has filled out; Jessica’s beaming and proud, Louis looks like he thinks he should check on Harvey’s sanity and he’s bitching that his tie isn’t formal enough for the occasion, but he’s still grinning ear to ear. Mike looks at Harvey like he always knew, clapping him on the back and pulling him into a hug while Rachel grabs onto Donna like a reunited sister and they both laugh and cry their excitement over the top of each other. Harvey’s slipped a textured navy jacket and tie on over the top of his shirt. Donna’s changed too, from her casual jumpsuit to a dress that she loves but hasn’t had the chance to wear yet. Sleeveless, white, not because she needs the symbolism but because Harvey loves her in white, irregular hemline slashing from her calf to her knee, and she’s in heels for the first time in at least a week. She misses the height difference but she loves the way Harvey’s eyes go slightly blank when he sees her.

Mike’s found an officiant somewhere on the way over, he explains to Donna. Jessica slips her hand along Donna’s elbow and murmurs her congratulations while she takes the officiant aside to fill in the details. 

Mike waves them off as he turns to her and smiles wide. “Donna.” He hugs her. “Good to see you’ve come up for air just in time to make a crazy decision.”

“Only just. And it was Harvey’s idea.” She kisses him on the cheek. “How’s the firm?”

“Fine.” She can hear the lie sitting under it but she lets it slide. “So this is the most Harvey approach to a wedding possible.”

She nods - it’s reactionary and bold, it’s impulsive, and best of all, it’s just like him. 

It’s perfect. 

“I’m happy for you,” Mike says. She squeezes his arm and starts to turn the subject to the ceremony, to where Mike needs to stand and what he needs to do, but he interrupts. “I mean it, Donna. I know how long you’ve waited. I know how hard it’s been.”

“It was a long two years, yes, but -”

“I don’t mean two years. I mean all of it.” 

She looks at Mike, and he’s looking back at her as clear as he ever has, and she can see that he knows the patience of each individual moment of the last 15 years. He saw the uncertainty, and the hope, and the quiet frustration, and he saw the way she quietly lay herself aside over and over for Harvey. 

He saw it all. 

“All of it,” he says again. “Every second, Donna.” He nods at Harvey. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to him. The best. He is who he is because you’ve loved him for as long as you’ve known him.”

Donna sucks back a watery breath and thinks about how when he wants to, Mike can really press where it hurts. “He’s always been a good man,” she says. 

“He has. But you’re the one who helped him know it.” 

“Are you going to tell me he’s not good enough for me?”

“He isn’t,” Mike says, and glances between Donna and Harvey with a smile. “But I guarantee you that there won’t ever be a second of the day he’s not trying to be good enough.”

As he says it, she catches Harvey’s eye, he smiles at her, and there’s a promise sitting in his eyes. He looks hopeful and settled, and he looks like he’s in love, and it’s for her. He murmurs _ I love you _ across the room at her, and she doesn’t have it in her to feel embarrassed at him being a big sap. She mouths back _ I know _ , and then they swap and she says she loves him and he says he knows. He tips his glass at her like he’s trying to pick her up in some bar, his smile pressing the corners of his eyes together. Donna thinks about all the times he looked at her like that in secret and about how he’s doing it now out loud in front of the whole world, and it takes everything in her not to cross the room and pull him into a kiss. 

Instead, she hugs Mike and says, “Thanks, Mike. I’m glad you’re here.”

And, a few moments later, with Rachel smiling through tears next to her, she steps up to Harvey, up to his bright smile and his hopeful eyes and that particular tilt of his head he gets, just every now and then, when he’s in a room full of people but he feels like it’s just him and her. She steps up to him in their living room, in front of the fireplace they’ve sat and eaten shitty takeaways in front of, where they’ve talked and laughed and dreamed together about the future and where they’ve dozed with their backs against the sofa, their hands resting in each others laps and the lick of flame warming their faces. Their home, where they’ve found each other at the end of long days before he’d gone away and where they now hold each other in the long slow of the morning, where they’ve made coffee to wake up and tea to relax and where they’ve kissed for hours as the twilight rolled through. They’ve talked about plans and dreams here, shopping lists and appointments, argued and made up and laughed and cried. They’ve been in this space as colleagues, as friends, they’ve shared forbidden glances and they’d told each other they loved each other for the first time here, around the kitchen counter while he was burning toast for breakfast. It had all happened here. 

And now she’s going to marry him here. 

They hadn’t written vows. There wasn’t time, and there wasn’t anything other to say than  _ I will _ and  _ I do _ . They’ve said everything they needed to say a thousand times over, not just in the last two years but in the decade before that. It just hadn’t sounded like  _ I do _ at the time. Instead it had sounded like  _ but with you it’s different _ or  _ do you want to be alone _ or  _ are you saying you’re coming back to me _ and what can they say to each other in this moment that means more than all of that? His eyes say it all anyway, even if all their time together hadn’t - they’re all love and promise and full up with the future, and there were no words she could say that could match what she sees in the way his smile pinches his eyes at the edges. 

I do, he says, and grins like he’s won the jackpot. 

I do, she says back, and she smiles, but she feels tears threatening, and she thinks,  _ holy shit. We made it.  _

They get married. 

-

  
  
  


They celebrate into the late hours with their friends and their parents. They dance and drink, and Donna secrets away dozens of tiny moments into her heart. Mike, giving a speech composed entirely of abuse thrown at Harvey over the various ways in which he’d been an idiot to wait as long as he had, while Harvey laughed deep into his chest and pressed a long slow kiss against her temple. Rachel, crying her makeup off at various points in the evening and pulling Donna aside to tell her she’s beautiful and Harvey’s the luckiest guy in the world, and Donna doesn’t argue with either of those statements. Jessica, giving Donna a subtle nod across the room, because she’d known longer than anyone else present how much had changed for them to all find themselves there. Her parents, proud and excited. 

But mostly she secrets away Harvey. 

Harvey, absentmindedly playing with the new ring sitting on his left hand like it had always been a part of him.

Harvey, smiling and still for long moments, taking his time to look across the room at her like there was nobody else in it.

Harvey, finding her out of nowhere through the evening, his hand brushing hers, and she lost track of the amount of times he leaned into her ear to murmur that she looked beautiful or that he loved her. 

Harvey, slipping his hand through hers to pull her into a slow dance as the night wore through and the music slowed. 

And, when everyone left, Harvey, drawing her into the bedroom, undressing her like she’s porcelain, something deep and still slipping between them as he kisses her and murmurs  _ I want to make love to my wife _ . He says the words ‘my wife’ like he’s praying, and if it hadn’t taken 15 years she’d swear she was dreaming. 

But she isn’t, and he’s real, and they’d found each other in the world outside their unsaid fantasies and hopes. 

It’s everything. 

-

It’s Monday morning. Harvey’s getting dressed, and two weeks without working out and reacquainting himself with food that contains flavour hasn’t taken the edge off the physicality he walked out of prison with. His suits still don’t fit quite the same as they used to, and they’re not this season, which would have been unacceptable a couple of years ago, and even though Donna’s talked him down from a panic attack over it in the last few days, it still all adds up to uncomfortable. 

He’s not panicking, not really, but he’s working hard to stop his fingers shaking as he fights, again, with the buttons on the cuff of his shirt. He guesses he shouldn’t know what walking back into his old firm after two years, and two years in prison at that, should feel like, but he’s still nervous. His nerves have turned his heartbeat into a cramped rhythm against his ribs, and even in the morning cool of his bedroom he feels an inch away from breaking into a damp sweat. 

He’s trying to get the knot in his tie to sit right when Donna slips up quietly behind him and wraps her arms around his waist, bumping her nose into the ridge between his shoulder blades. “You okay?”

“Yeah. Just trying to remember how to do this whole morning routine thing.”

“Oh come on, it’s just like old times,” she says. She nudges him in the shoulder so that he turns to face her, and she smoothes his tie down, her face drawn in a bittersweet smile. Her wedding ring edges off the side of his lapel as she does and it’s new enough in the familiar of her tidying that she glances at it in the same moment he does. 

“I like that this bit is different,” Harvey says. 

“Me too.” She tugs on his tie lightly, pulling him down to kiss him quickly, then says, “Let’s go. Just because you’re potentially unemployed doesn’t mean we can sit around here all day worrying about your hair. I actually have a job.”

Harvey laughs almost in spite of himself, her kind refusal to let him spiral tethering him to the here and now, and he says, “thanks,” as he follows her out the bedroom and towards whatever the day has waiting. 

-

Walking back into the office after two years is as bizarre as he’d thought it would be, but the hardest part of the day is watching Donna walk down the hall to her desk and his old office, and not just because of the bittersweet kick in the guts he feels at having to remind himself that it’s not his office anymore. They’ve been constant in each other’s presence for two weeks now, and the feel of his hand dropping to his side from the small of her back leaves him feeling a lot more exposed than he was expecting. 

But he has to admit the view is good, especially when she looks back over her shoulder to wink at him. 

He walks into Jessica’s office, and she greets him with a hug and gestures for him to have a seat on the couch opposite her. “How are you?” she asks.

“I’m … processing,” Harvey says. “Things are different. But I’m handling it okay, I think.” He shrugs loosely. 

“Are you going to be able to be okay with not practising law?” Jessica asks. 

It takes Harvey a long moment to respond, “I don’t know how to answer that.” 

Because he doesn’t. 

The study of law and the practise of it have been virtually all consuming for him for the better part of two decades. He’s sacrificed for it, a lot, and not just the things everyone knows lawyers give up - Saturdays and leaving at 5pm and being able to leave his work at work. He’s given those up, but he’s also given up so much more. Mostly, he’d lain down anything that made him feel too much. He’d thrown out  _ caring makes you weak _ like a security blanket, but it wasn’t just that. It was also that caring made him stop and think and consider his own complicity in the hollow pain that chased him like a ghost for years. Caring made him weak, but thinking made him scared. So he didn’t. Instead, he practised law. 

And now… well, now he had to figure out what all that meant. So he just says, “I guess I’ll have to work it all out.” 

“There’ll always be a place for you here, Harvey,” Jessica says. It sounds like a reassurance, but Harvey hears the hesitation hiding behind her words. 

“But?” he asks.

She sighs. “But if I’m honest, I don’t know what I can offer you right now. Things are … there are a lot of eyes watching us closely right now.”

“Gibbs told me she wouldn’t come after any of you if I -”

“She hasn’t, Harvey. She kept her word.” She gestures towards him. “But we still had a senior partner go to prison for fraud. And the kid at the centre of that lawsuit is still here.”

“As a consultant, not a lawyer.”

“You know as well as I do that distinction doesn’t make a damn bit of difference to the people deciding if they want to give us their business or not.”

“What are you saying, Jessica?” he asks. 

“I’m saying I can’t offer you anything, Harvey.”

He hadn’t been expecting an offer, not really, because he’d already known everything she’d just said deep down. But hearing it out loud from Jessica lands on him like a ton of bricks anyway. 

“I know this probably isn’t what you were expecting,” she said. “And I wish I could do more. But even if Mike stepped down, bringing you back would put us in the ground, Harvey.”

“I understand.” And she’d done everything, he knew. The reason he left prison with a place to live and anything in his bank account in the first place was because of Jessica, quietly covering bills and keeping up his salary, probably out of her own pocket. 

“I can’t ever repay you. For any of it,” he says, and hopes she knows he’s not just talking about his rent and salary. He owed her. Not just for these past two years, but for everything. For law school, and his career, and Donna, and for standing by him when he’d run fully alongside Mike into his selfish impulses and put everything she’d worked for at risk. 

He deserved exactly nothing from her and yet she’d quietly upheld him anyway. 

He stands and hugs her.

He’ll worry about what he’s going to do later. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you for reading and coming on this journey - multi chapters are a huge commitment for an audience to join in on and I so appreciate everyone who is reading! Please leave a review and let me know what you think, feedback is the life blood of the fanfic community.


	12. 12

Away from work and people who don’t know him like Donna knows him, Harvey has revealed himself as someone not particularly invested in sitting on a sofa in the way you’d expect. Instead, he lies stretched out, face down and hiking a cushion under his cheek, or he kicks his legs over the armrests or the backrest, lets his head hang over the cushions, watching television with his head upside down like it’s completely normal. Tonight, he’s keeping half an eye on a Survivor rerun (he likes it; Donna doesn’t but she likes the way he analyses every episode like it’s a presidential election) and texting Marcus back and forth as he does. He used to prefer to call, but he texts more, now. She thinks it’s because he’s learning words mean more than he’d like, and he’s still figuring out what that means, and he’s started finding ways to be more careful with what he says. He’s finding that texts are a good buffer between who he was and who he’s learning to be. 

And he does it all with his head dangling upside down off the edge of the sofa cushions.

Donna finds it adorable. She perches herself on the floor in front of the sofa, using the cushions and front rail as a back rest so that her shoulder can nudge against his, and they joke low about whatever they’re watching while Harvey absentmindedly curves his elbow so he can drift his fingers through her hair. 

“Hey,” she says, bringing her hand to the back of his head. “Survivor?”

“Mmm,” he says, and he sounds distracted, and he also sounds suspiciously like he does when he’s trying to come across more virtuous than whatever scheme he’s knee deep in. Donna glances to the side to find him looking studiously innocent, and he has his arm hung out at a too-long angle. He’s trying to take a photo of her, in his shirt and slouched socks, because he loves her like that. He secrets them away in his phone. Sometimes she catches him looking through them with a smile, and she thinks, with just a pang of bittersweet, how on earth it had taken them this long.

But she has a role in his play-acting too, so she tsks at him and knocks his head sideways with a gentle swipe of her hand, saying, “Harvey I look terrible,” and he presses a kiss into the side of her neck as a peace offering while she calls his show stupid and he laughs into his chest and goes back to his phone screen. 

“How’s Marcus?” she asks, when he’s finished his conversation and dropped his phone on the floor under his head. She drops her head to press a kiss against his cheek as she does, just because she can, and she’s still not used to being able to do that again, and she didn’t have time to get used to it in the first place. He keeps his eyes on the tv but smiles shyly as he does, because he’s not used to it either. 

“Mmm?” he says, taking a moment to focus in from the way she’d pressed her lips against the slight stubble along his jaw, and she smiles back. He’s open with the fact she distracts him these days. He used to try to hide it, when it was all furtive glances through glass panels, a hundred years ago. “Oh. Good, I think. Keeps asking when we’re heading up for a visit. Him, Katie and Lily are threatening to rent a house out on Block Island for the week with all of us and the kids.”

He says it like he’s just passing on the info, but there’s something different sitting under his voice. Before prison, before Lily, he never would have mentioned it in the first place, and, if Donna had dragged it out of him, he’d have muttered sullenly about being too busy with work or with Mike or with some other excuse. But now he’s sharing with her, like it’s normal, like it’s easy, like his family is a family that gets together on weekends and holidays, and she supposes, maybe they are now. 

She thinks for just a moment,  _ this man _ , and secrets away her pride over it all in her ribs. 

“Do you want to go?” She sets her elbow onto the edge of the couch cushions so she can slip her fingers inside the collar of his shirt, nudge her palm along his collarbone. It still feels like an event, touching him. She’s not sure if she wants it to start feeling normal at some point or not. 

“Do you?”

She feels an unbidden smile crease her eyes, and she finds herself running her hand up to press her fingers through his hair and push his fringe back from his forehead. “That’d be really nice,” she says, and it comes out a lot softer than she’d expected. 

He smiles, just an edge of self consciousness sneaking into the corners of his eyes. He’s vulnerable, these days, and open, but he’s still learning and there’s still courage involved in it. Harvey isn’t a meet-the-family guy. He’s always said it. He said it when it was soon enough after they’d met that Donna believed him. He’d kept saying it even after she stopped believing him. And even now, when they’ve cried and laughed with Lily in a hospital room, met each other’s families, and got spontaneously married at the tail end of a dinner party, he’s still trying his family on like it’s a coat he’s not sure suits him. “Okay then,” he says. “I’ll call Marcus and work out some dates. Hopefully your new boss will let you have the time off.”

“He will.” Donna sits back against the couch, raises an eyebrow, and takes a sip of her wine. “Mike won’t be a problem.”

“...because he’s scared of you?”

She laughs. “Terrified.” He chuckles too, and they watch hungry competitors yell at each other on a beach for a moment before Donna decides to make sure he’s not just doing what he figures married couples do. “Do you want to go?” she asks. “We don’t have to if you’re not ....” Ready? Confident? She can’t quite grab on to the right word and she leaves the sentence hanging. 

He considers for a moment. Anyone else would read it as hesitation, but she can see him turning over her question in his head, serious and genuine. She’s not someone he just… placates, not anymore. 

Finally, he says, “Yeah… yeah. It’ll be good. I can show you around. You’d like Boston.” He looks at her with a kind of shy pride she’s learning about that he’s never really shown her. Harvey’s pride always talked like arrogance, and he’s cocky, still, but the kind of hometown pride she associates with Bostonians never sat obviously on him.  _ Facets _ , she thinks. He’s showing her more every day, and she loves him for it. 

She ducks to give him a kiss, just because she can, and yeah, she thinks she won’t ever get used to it. 

She’s smiling when he pulls back, and he looks at her curiously, says, “what?”

“You, in a house with two kids, for a whole week?”

He feigns offense and slips a hand through hers to tease her fingers over his own. “Hey, I’m an excellent uncle,” he says.

“Really.” She lets the sarcasm sit in the air and in her eyebrow, and he laughs. 

“I am! We’re big on kids in my family. Always have been.”

Donna laughs, but there’s something almost wistful sitting behind his eyes as he talks. Because he’s right. Harvey is shit with anniversaries, and presents, and he can’t remember his own phone number, but he has always, always remembered his nieces birthdays. He’d mention it to her, he’d pass on a list of the gifts he wanted to get, he’d check she was on top of the delivery. He insisted on writing the cards. She insisted on wrapping, after he’d tried, once, and she’d said, “Jesus, Harvey, it looks like a serial killer wrapped this.”

He still pretended, of course. Still pretended presents were an annoyance and an obligation, pretended ‘the girls’ were part of a family he wanted nothing to do with. But she’d noticed, because it was so out of the character he presented to everyone, and because she notices everything anyway, that the way Harvey was about them was … different. Gentle, somehow, and thoughtful. Even when he’d been swept up in the worst of his own impulses, he’d always been good to them. 

And there’s something in the wistfulness that’s always sat inside him when he talks about them that makes her think, maybe. 

“Would you?” he asks, almost out of nowhere. The hand that’s moved from her hand to sit rhythmically messing with the hair at the back of her neck drops, drapes over her shoulders, and he crooks his wrist so he can outline the length of the side of her neck with his thumb. 

“Mmm?” she says. She’s half paying attention to him, half watching the show, but mostly just enjoying the feel of touch that doesn’t have the weight of their entire relationship, or the tension of nearly-gone or just-back behind it. For the longest time, every touch was world-ending, kept her awake into the wee hours, distracted and over-analysing, and then after he found his way to her, every touch was crucial, because they only had a few days together. And now she can touch him lightly, and easily, just because, just because he’s hers and she’s his and that’s what married couples do because they’re married now. 

“Want to?” he says, and then, haltingly, “have kids? Some day. I mean. Not right now. Well, we could. If you want to. But… some day.”

Well. 

Donna looks down at him, and Harvey looks up at her, and he’s smiling but he’s nervous, he’s so nervous, and she thinks again about the wonder of him being here, just saying the things in his heart out loud, and trusting her with all of it. 

She’s never said anything about kids out loud, because when she was young she wasn’t sure, but she did know that women talking about children in the workplace was a one way ticket to lowering the glass ceiling to whichever floor you were already on. And then, when she’d settled into life and her career, and the thought of  _ family _ became an idle, and then an important thought - well then it was always Harvey. He hovered around the edges of her relationships, her plans, her nighttime dreams, and she couldn’t imagine a family with Mitchell, or Stephen, or any of the other people that slipped in and out of her life, because there wasn’t any space to imagine a family with them. 

Harvey was already there. 

She just never thought he’d feel the same. 

“Kids would be nice,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” And she meets her smile with his own as she bumps her mouth against his, a long, gentle kiss, her hand slipping up along his jaw, and she thinks,

Kids. Yeah. Kids. 

  
  
  


-

  
  
  


A couple of weeks after Marcus has called, Harvey is working on finalising dates with his family, and they’d suggested this weeked, but there’s something else big happening, and Harvey is on his way back from the local bodega, picking up fresh toothbrushes for both of them so Donna can finish packing her overnight bag for the wedding and the room at the plaza. 

He’s lost in thought, and he’s learning, there are consequences. Normally, it would be something he’d pile on the ever growing list of his hard won and battleworn lessons, but this one is different. Every other lesson he’s learned and lived by has been about avoiding exactly where he’s now found himself. 

Harvey is a man who has always been able to find an escape hatch, always been able to see a path through, always instinctively known a way out. He hid it behind metaphor and movie quotes, but it all boiled down to the same thing, really - when Harvey talked about guns and playing the man and breaking goddamn walls down, he was really saying one thing: there aren’t any consequences, not really. There’s always a way out. 

Harvey is learning he’s wrong about that. 

He can live with that. But it’s harder to watch Donna have to live with it. Especially when he lets himself in the front door, and she’s standing, as she sometimes does now, with her palms on the kitchen counter, halfway through making coffee or food when she finds herself distracted by whatever nervousness over the future comes through. 

“Hey,” he says, dropping the toothbrushes on the counter next to her. “You okay?”

She blinks, says “yeah,” but it sounds more like a question than reassurance.

He lengthens his body behind her, wraps his arms around her waist, nudges a kiss into her shoulder. “Hey,” he says again. “Donna. Talk to me.”

Donna distractedly lifts her hand to brush at the hair behind his ear. “It’s just. I mean, I knew in my head you aren’t a lawyer anymore. And I suspected that Jessica wouldn’t be able to bring you back. But… but I really had my heart set on having you back at your desk. It doesn’t seem right without you. The whole place is too… big.”

She turns in his arms, turns into him, so she can slip her hands around his waist, but she can’t quite meet his eyes. 

“And I’m so glad, Harvey. I’m so happy. I get to come home to you. I just…” she shrugs. “I knew things had changed. I just didn’t realise that would mean everything would be so different.” She wrinkles her nose as she says it, aware of the irony sitting heavy on her words. 

Harvey knows exactly what she means. 

“I know,” he says. He runs his fingers along the stray wisp of hair straying down the side of her temple and tucks it behind her ear. “Me too. I knew in my head I probably wouldn’t be able to go back, but whenever i thought of being home… it was the same.” 

That, at least, pulls a smile from her. “Hey. Hopefully not  _ all _ the same,” she says, and nudges the butt of her thumb over his wedding band. “Pretty sure the way you woke me up this morning is different to how it used to be.” She gives him a knowing look, and he almost blushes. He had been particularly… eager, earlier that day. It’s lucky Donna has a long dress for the wedding because she’ll be carrying enthusiastic bruises on her hips and legs for a few days. 

They’re also growing more comfortable with each other in the way they touch, the way they make love and in the way they share what they need from each other. Donna, he’s finding, is entirely more enthusiastic, playful, and adventurous than he’d guessed, though he’s not sure why he thought she wouldn’t be. Donna embraces life with gusto, always has, and it makes sense she’s the same in the bedroom, running the gamut from light and tender to goading him to smack harder while she gutters the words ‘fuck me’ over her vocal chords and pushes her ass back against his hips.

Strawberries and cream, he’s found, are very much the tip of the iceberg. 

He has to force himself to focus. He finds her devastating, distracting, so much so that ‘Harvey, concentrate’ has become a common refrain in their apartment. 

“Not all,” he says, finally. “But work. You. Me. My office.” He shrugs, searching the words. “I’m not sure I know exactly who I am if I’m not…”

“The best closer in New York?”

He shrugs, a noncommittal ‘yes’. But it’s a big conversation, one they don’t have time for right now. 

There’s a big night ahead of them.

In another life, this would have crippled him - not just the disbarring, but trying to talk about it, and then trying not to talk about. He would have refused any council, any help, and then glowered his way through the world for a couple of weeks. But none of those tired instincts take over tonight. 

Instead, he smiles, and it reaches his eyes. He hugs her into him, and kisses her, gentle and quick. “We’ll figure it out, okay?”

She kisses him back, and hers is slower, longer, and now he does lose himself in her. She can do that, somehow, one kiss and he’s gone. 

It’s Donna who eventually pulls back, smack his chest lightly, and says, “now go get ready. We’re going to be late.”

-

  
  


Mike and Rachel get married at the plaza, just like Rachel had always wanted. 

It’s beautiful, and touching, a celebration that’s been long coming, and Harvey has to bite down on the bittersweet war in his chest between thankfulness that they waited for him and sadness that they had to. But Mike finds him before the ceremony and hugs him like he’s his brother, and Rachel embraces him afterwards with the kind of fluttering generosity he’s always loved about her, and she insists on dancing with him after she’s been led by Mike and Robert, and he thinks, he’s glad he’s there. 

Mike had stolen Rachel back, afterwards, cracking a joke at Harvey’s expense in repayment for the best man speech in which Harvey had spent most of his time finding creative ways to call him an idiot. Harvey had laughed, and then taken a quiet moment at the edge of the dance floor. He knows a lot of people here, but there’s also a lot of faces that are vaguely or entirely unfamiliar. Two years is a long time to miss, and Mike and Rachel have still been making friends, and meeting clients, and visiting family, and he’s missed all of that. He stands with a loose sense of having missed something, of walking into a movie halfway through, of an abrupt and unexpected left turn. It’s not awful, but it seeps through him like a low level culture shock. It’s been over a month. He still doesn’t quite fit like he used to. 

Prison, he’s learning, carries its punishment far past its own walls. 

But just as he’s starting to feel his fingers twitch nervously into his palms, she’s there, like she always is, slipping her hand into his. 

“Hey,” she says quietly, and Harvey glances at her. She’s stunning, wearing her simple black dress like it had been made specially for her, her hair lightly curled and draped over one shoulder, eyes just like they always are, all faith and love, and not for the first time that evening he wonders how he ever managed to pull any of this off and find his way to her despite everything.

“Hey,” he says, nods towards the dance floor. “Shall we?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” she says, and tugs him lightly out to the floor, slipping her body against his and finding a way, as she always does, to make him feel like there’s nobody else in the room, nobody else other than just her and him. She drapes an arm around his waist, her other hand in his, and he leads her.

He loves dancing with her. It’s a bubble, just them, and there’s dozens of other people on the floor as well, couples moving together, talking, laughing and singing, but the feel of her waist under his palm and the way she holds his eyes with hers, or leans her head against his shoulder, or runs her hand loosely over his back - they could be the only people in the whole world and he’d never know the difference. 

He pushes her out to spin her, and she laughs as she does, and when she comes back in to press her body against his again, she jokes about ballroom lessons in Danbury. She’s good at that. Prison was awful, for both of them, and they’ll wear the scars of it forever - all the vitamin e she massages across his torso won’t ever make the physical ones disappear completely, and it’s the same for both of them in the non-physical as well. They both still jolt awake at night, at least a couple of times a week. Harvey dreams he’s back inside, being cornered in the yard or just staring at blank concrete walls. Donna dreams she’s waiting, coming home to an empty house and empty bed. One of them will dream, and then bolt awake, disoriented, and then gather the other against them, seeking touch, reassurance, sometimes seeking frantic contact and comfort, and more than once he’s woken to her pulling him on top of her with loose kisses and slicking her hand down his body to stroke him, pull him inside her before he’s fully hard, just needing the feeling of him warm, heavy and present and real. At other times he’s woken with a start and her name on his lips, hand grasping out for her. It’s the same for him - sometimes he needs her stroking her hand through his hair and murmuring that it’s okay, that she’s there. Other times it’s raw, physical, and it’s only a moment before she’s hovering her weight over him, hands on his torso while she slides down his body to take him in her mouth and push any thought other than her out of his mind. He’s not sure how long it will last, but she’s finding ways to move it out of tortured conversations and the press of skin on skin and into the easy way they joke, because they both know it’ll sit with them forever. They can’t make it disappear, but they can find ways for it to sit light instead of heavy.

So Donna jokes, about prison and dance partners, and he laughs, easily and freely, along with her. It’s an open bar, and he’s been careful - his tolerance has gone to shit after two years - but he’s still pleasantly buzzed and why not, because Mike and Rachel booked rooms for the wedding party, so bed is just a couple of minutes away and they’re not facing a late night gauntlet of taxi stands and traffic. He’s planning to be here until late into the night, farewelling guests and eventually Mike and Rachel, until Donna leads him, happy and shabby and tired, up to bed. 

Donna, though, leans into his shoulder, just so her mouth nudges his ear, says, “you look good tonight,” and it’s sweet but it’s also just suggestive enough that he feels his eyebrow quirk up. As she says it, her thumb drifts across the back of his hand, and nobody else would have even seen it, but there’s a spark there that doesn’t have anything to do with dancing. 

“Just trying to keep up with you,” he says, his hand drifting low on her waist, as low as he can manage before he crosses the line from dancing into outright groping. “You’re wearing the fuck out of that dress.” He presses a light kiss against her cheek.

And then, feeling her low smile against his jaw, she murmurs, “I’m mainly thinking about you taking it off right now.”

That kicks him low in the gut. As she’s speaking, he glances out across the dance floor, and Mike catches his gaze, smiles knowingly, and tilts his head a little towards the exit. Harvey wonders distantly if it’s that it’s late and Mike is being kind or if Harvey is just being obvious, but he doesn’t have it in him to care too much. 

He smiles at Mike, murmurs in Donna’s ear, “let’s get out of here.”

“Harvey, you’re the best man and I’m the maid of honour. We have to -”

He cuts her off. “Mike and Rachel will be fine,” he says. “Right now, I wanna be with my wife.”

It takes them a lot longer to get to the elevator than it should, because she’s overwhelming, and he has to pause every few steps to kiss her. There’s people around, so it’s just him pulling her against him, his lips against her temple or ducking into the crook of her neck, but her hand at the small of his back is swinging all sorts of emotions into his chest and he can’t quite get the balance of needing to touch her and needing to get her alone quite right. 

What he is not expecting is the way Donna slips her fingers through his and squeezes his palm in the elevator on the way to their room. She tilts his chin around to meet her gaze with her other hand, says quietly, “Harvey. I thought we’d be… tired, after this evening, and I didn’t think we’d need to talk about this tonight, but…”

“What?” he says. 

She looks at him with a nervous smile, but her eyes are steady. “I didn’t refill my prescription.”

Harvey blinks, thinks, ‘oh’, and the elevator on the way to his hotel room is a weird place for him to have a flash of his future, ten and twenty years away, kick through his brain. And yet. 

She reads too much into his silence, continues in a rush, “it’s only the first day, so it’s not a big deal, and I know this is a huge decision and maybe we aren’t ready, so we can keep talking about it, I was going to -”

He cuts her off with his hands on her jaw and his lips over hers. 

They almost don’t make it to their hotel room. By the time the elevator doors open on their floor Donna’s flushed, eyes glazed over and she's probably going to find herself nursing bruised shoulder blades in the morning from the way Harvey pressed her solidly into the corner of the elevator to kiss her so breathless that she looks like she’s forgotten where she is. 

He leads her out of the elevator, backing to their room door, eyes locked - Donna, his wife, lover, the person who found him, chose him, looked straight into his worn out soul and pulled him out of himself, the person who knows him, the person who pressed rings onto his fingers and told him she’d always be there, the person who’s going to make him a father one day. She’s the one, the one who’s going to build him a world where he comes home to laughter and mess, to strawberry blonde babies and to her instead of to silence and whisky - 

He doesn’t quite believe it, but he believes her. 

He pulls her inside, tracing his steps from memory from where they’d dropped their bags earlier, and he pulls his own tie from around his neck as he does because Donna’s wrapped up in his eyes and holding onto the lapels of his jacket. She’s looking at him with eyes that are so deep he’s not sure it’s physically possible, glassy and shining and maybe she’s crying a little, he’s pretty sure he is, and he feels his fingers shaking as he backs himself against the bed and sits at the same time he hooks his thumbs under the thin straps of her dress and slips them off her shoulders. 

Donna settles on his lap, draping her arms around his neck, slicking her mouth and tongue over his, scratching fingers through his scalp as he slides her dress down her torso and lets it pool at her waist. He tickles back up, one hand cupping her cheek, his other going to his collar so he can loosen the button at his neck and work his shirt open. 

Donna comes back to herself enough to push her hands over his, work his shirt buttons open to his waist, and she spreads it open under his jacket, sliding sliding her hands over his torso and sides, pressing his arms back so she can shuck both off him at the same time, and he brings his hands up immediately to cradle her head, kiss her unblinking, and he tries to say  _ I love you _ but it comes out, “Donna.”

She reaches behind her, unclasps her bra and lets it drop behind her, and in the same movement finds his hands with hers, linking her fingers between his and pressing them lightly together before sliding his palms over her breasts. She takes a moment to guide him, squeezing his hands under hers, and she doesn’t need to, but he loves when she shows him what she’s looking for, it’s bold and generous, totally lacking in self-consciousness and completely her. 

She finds his thumbs and guides them over her nipples, then lets him take over and sighs through the feeling of him teasing them into taut buds, sliding her hands along his shoulders and up his neck. She presses her mouth into the space behind his ear, breathes heavy against his earlobe and he finds her saying things that are objectively ridiculous when it’s the light of day or dialogue put to film, but that mean everything when it’s her voice in the tiny gap between her lips and his ear. She murmurs sweet nothings about him being hers, being her only one, about how she’s loved him for years, how she wants him, needs him, wants him to fuck her, to be in her, wants him to make her a mother. She murmurs until he catches her nipples just right under his fingers and she bites herself off with a shallow ‘oh’, and she lands a hand on his chest and leans in lightly, half instruction and half needing something to keep her attached to reality. 

He lets her press him back into the mattress, and she shifts, settling over his hips, her weight slight but finding the perfect pressure over him. He still has his hands over her, stroking her nipples and massaging her breasts in his palms. She sits back on him a little, slides her hands over him, exploring his torso, the sweep of his scars; the two big slashes from Gallo, and the dozens of smaller white lines, from boxing, and from being thrown up against concrete walls in the countless beatdowns he’d caught over the last couple of years. In the past, in the him who paraded women through his bedroom, they’d have embarrassed him - would have forced explanations and excuses he couldn’t have found a way to talk about, even if he’d wanted to. But now they’re just part of him, part of Donna, because he’s part of her now he supposes, and he doesn’t care, it’s just what he looks like, and she loves him for it. 

So it’s not embarrassing when she curls over him, nudging one of his arms up towards the headboard so she can press a line of kisses along the puckered curve snaking along his side and under his armpit, and then she continues, up his side and over his bicep, teeth worrying at the muscle kicking out under his skin because she’s found the spot that tickles just a bit. She pulls her tongue slowly up his arm, over his shoulder, along his collarbone, pausing to press a long moment against his clavicle, and then she’s kissing up his neck and finding her lips against his. 

Harvey feels his throat catch in a grunt against her tongue, and he blindly slides his hand down her back, dipping under her pooled dress at her waist and cupping her ass, pulling just a little until she hitches up, so he can work her dress out from between them, and it doesn’t hurt that the angle she shifts to presses her center firmly against his cock for a moment. He huffs out a breath against her mouth, and feels her smile. He thinks, this woman is going to kill me one day, but just for a moment, because then she’s sliding her body down his, peppering his torso with light, half-distracted kisses as she does, and then most of his conscious thought blinks out as she presses her hand firmly along him over his pants. 

She kisses her way over his belly, over his waist band, and looks up at him with an indescribable mix of love and challenge as she follows her stroking hand with her mouth, wetting the front of his pants, eyebrow quirking at his shallow “fuck”, and she pops the button on his pants. She slips the zipper down, taps his hip lightly in instruction, and when he shifts up off the bed for a moment, drags his pants and briefs down in one swift tug. Harvey pulls in a deep breath to steady himself at the feeling of the cool evening air over his skin but that only helps for a split second before he’s yanked back into oblivion by the feeling of Donna taking him in hand, slicking her hand along his length and then smoothly taking the head of his cock into her mouth, pressing her tongue against the tip for a moment, almost testing, before taking him in further and sucking firmly. 

He knocks his head back against the mattress and says her name in a shallow moan as his fingers blindly find and tangle through her hair. She tastes him, pressure, pushing down, her hand sliding against his base, her other cupping him, massaging for a moment before rolling her palm up his torso to find his chest, thumbing over a nipple. Harvey tries to lift his head and watch her, because she’s gorgeous, but it’s too much all at once so he just gasps her name shallowly into the ceiling and tries to keep his breathing from bottoming out altogether. 

After a long moment, just before he’s going to need to gasp  _ stop _ , with his arm pushed up over his eyes to block out the world, she releases him with a final loose, wet, self-satisfied pop, immediately slipping her hand up over his head, thumbing over the tip, saliva and his own precome mixing under her fingers. She presses light, slightly distracted kisses against his thighs and the bones that slash his hips, and when he gathers himself enough to look down from under his bicep, she’s already smiling at him with that goddamned eyebrow sitting high like she’s daring him to keep his hands off her. 

“Good?” she murmurs.

“Fucking hell,” he says.

Donna laughs against his skin, kissing her way up his body until she catches his lips with hers, light and slack, and he can taste himself on her tongue. She finds his hand, guides him down between her legs, then presses up to kiss his nose, his forehead, and settles a breast over his mouth. He loves the feeling of her sucking in a breath when he lathes his tongue around her nipple between pressing open mouth over. He flicks her nipple under his tongue, then sucks down, at the same time she hooks her underwear off her hips and he slicks a finger in between her folds, ticking up until he finds the edge of her clit and nudges against it. 

She has her hands and arms around him, cradling his head against her, throaty breaths catching to let him know when he’s got the pressure on her nipple and between her legs just right. He finds her with his thumb, circling lazily before pressing down, and she’s so wet that he can’t help but slide a finger inside her to his knuckle, and she automatically says his name and rocks her hips against him. He stills to let her settle, let her find the right angle, and when she pushes just right, finds the edge of the wall she’s seeking and leans in, he strokes against it, pressing a second finger in after a moment, teasing her clit as she kicks her pubic bone against the heel of his palm. 

He tweaks her nipple between his lips and teeth, alternating between light, scraping bites and languid suction, and her breath starts up in light huffs, pressing against her lungs like she can’t quite catch her breath. 

She’s close, and she starts to draw away from him, to get her breath back, to pull control back under her fingers, and starts to reach for his cock, but he stills her hand with his own before cupping her jaw and drawing her mouth to his. 

“We have time,” he murmurs. “I’ve got you. Let me.”

She sighs out against his mouth, a shallow nod, and takes his hand on her cheek to press it over her breasts, and she breathes his name against him. He massages slowly, thumbing over her nipple, and presses his fingers inside her more firmly, finding a rhythm against her hips that makes her punch low moans over her vocal chords. 

He presses, slow and steady, over her clit, her nipples, against just the right spot inside her, building not with speed but with rhythmic repetition, and she comes, a couple of minutes later, kissing her orgasm against his mouth with hitching breaths, her muscles tight around his fingers. 

She’s euphoric, slack and lithe, when she slips a hand between them and guides him inside as she collapses on top of him. She’s floating, wanting him filling her but needing a minute, and he tickles his fingers up her back, kisses her temple, lets her tuck her face into the crook of his sweat-slicked neck. He takes a moment to remember it, all of this, the feeling of her, wet, slowly stretching around him, pulsing lightly from the last edges of her orgasm, of her, euphoric, but edging back to reality and to him, of satisfaction and of hunger all mixed together, and he thinks it’s the single most perfect moment he’s ever had with her.

It’s a few moments before she starts pressing in light kisses wherever she finds her lips, along the length of his neck, into his collarbone, against his jaw, finding her bones again and slipping her hands up over his chest. She presses up, leaning on her hands, bracing against him, eyes on his, and picks up a slow, shallow hitch of her hips against his, hiking up a little to slip him out and then back in, and even though it’s slight, it’s gentle, it’s already a lot. Donna’s eyes are blown completely black, eyes locked on him, and he’s not blinking but he wants to close his eyes because this, her, everything, is almost too much. 

He’s painfully aware of how goddamn lucky he is to be here. 

Donna’s pushing harder now, sinking him deep inside her, catching her hips against his, they fit like destiny, and she’s tight and still fluttering a little around him even as she grips, squeezes, and he thinks about kicking his hips up to meet her but she’s perfect and he can’t bring himself to do anything but stare at her like she’s a mirage and he’s been too long in the desert. 

It’s quickly too much for him, and it’s too much for her as well. He has to close his eyes and she has to lean forward, pressing her cheek against his and punching gravelled breaths into his ear. He palms the back of her head, tangling her hair through his fingers, his other arm wrapping around her and pressing chest to chest, sweat and breath mixing between them, and he’s pretty sure she’s going to kill him and he doesn’t care. 

“Donna,” he manages, after too many minutes where he’s not sure he’s going to be able to keep breathing.

She kisses his cheek loosely, says she loves him. He says he’s close. She says, me too, blindly guides his hand between them. He’s so beyond reality that all he can do is push down firmly, he’s beyond rhythm and teasing, and he just presses in and lets her fuck herself against his hand, trying to push down the coil forming low in his gut. 

They catch each other's eyes, then, she pulls back as his head knocks against the mattress, and he looks at her, and she looks at him but he thinks she’s also looking into him, her hand on his chest, and he swears he can feel her heartbeat in her fingertips. It’s all he can do, while his stomach pulls up against his spine, to push a hand to her cheek and just know. 

It’s her.

It’s her name that punches past his lungs when he comes, and it’s different. It’s not just the release, not just that it’s her, there’s something else far beyond them going on, beyond the love and scattered lust - the feeling of maybe, maybe this is the start, of family, of change, of all the things he swore he never wanted. It’s still static, still him blinking away from reality for a moment, but it’s not just that anymore. 

She sinks over him a moment longer, and then she’s falling apart as well, clenching around him, shaking arms and hands against his chest and her stomach fluttering under his splayed palm. 

It’s a long moment later, with Donna shucked against his chest, his hands drifting absentmindedly, that she finally shifts off him, ignoring the mess and flush of damp, and settles along the length of his body. “That was…”

She doesn’t have a word for it, but he gets it. “Yeah. I know.”

“I feel…”

“Different?”

“Yeah.” 

He lays a hand on her back, and thinks, not for the first time, that he wouldn’t trade a second of the last two years if that’s the thing that brought him to this moment. 

“I know. Me too,” he says, and thumbs through her hair until she falls asleep. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As always, thank you to my good friends in the Darvey fandom:
> 
> \- Aditi, who betas, encourages, and panicked adorably through this entire chapter  
> \- Luisa, who's conversations and insight got me out of the interminable writer's block I had over this chapter  
> \- Cassie, who illustrates everything gorgeously including this (check out @darveypainted)
> 
> \- You, for reading  
> \- extra thanks to those of you who have taken the time to comment. It means the world.


	13. Chapter 13

Harvey’s been out for six months. It doesn’t feel like it, but he can’t tell if it feels like it’s more like six minutes or six years.

He’s working, again. He has a job that might become a career. Work is still new. He still can’t quite believe he landed on his feet in the way he has, and he figures, maybe God or Jesus or that dog from _All Dogs Go To Heaven_ or whoever it was upstairs had taken pity on him in some undeserving way. 

One of his clients, a baseball player, had called him. He wasn’t well known, at least nationally, but he was smart with his money, even when he’d been just stepping out into the pro league, when Harvey had first met him and had nearly turned him down as a client. Harvey represented Jordan and Johnson, Phelps and Manning. He didn’t represent third pick rookies skirting around the edges of sponsorships. But even then, Harvey had been struck by the way he’d had his eyes well past pro ball. He’d been looking ahead to when his knees were shot and to whenever his stats would start to slip. He didn’t want to be another has-been second baseman on some television dance show trying to earn enough money for the mortgage on his apartment, he’d told Harvey when Harvey had met him.

He hadn’t turned him down. Kid was smart. 

That had been five, six years ago now. And the kid had never hit the big time, but he’d played solid, earned his pay checks, stayed smart, he’d plied his money into different investments and portfolios under Harvey’s guidance, and he was going to retire with enough to live in the way Harvey had lived, once upon a time, with women and rooftop bars and penthouses. 

He had been one of the many clients Harvey had called, before he’d gone down, to apologise to, and to pass on Louis’ details, in the event he’d wanted the firm to continue to represent him. 

He’d been unreadable, silent at Harvey’s apology, thanking him evenly for Louis’ number, and Harvey hadn’t been able to tell at the time what he’d been thinking. 

And then, when he was out, just before Mike and Rachel had gotten married, his phone had rung, and it was this kid, with his portfolios and rooftop bars and parade of women. And he needed a rep. 

Harvey had helped him out, more out of loyalty than anything else. Harvey knows the law, and he knows sports, and he’s good at finding the thread between the two. As it turns out, Harvey was good at being a sports rep. 

Very good. 

Harvey had been asked, would you want to do this for me permanently. 

Harvey had said, I have to think about it. 

He’d told Donna. It had felt awkward, almost embarrassing. It had felt like moving on, from something he wasn’t really ready to move on from yet. Being a lawyer had reinforced everything broken in him - all his insecurities and defence mechanisms and bullshit and facades. Being a lawyer had made him successful, had made him a lot of money, but it had also made him a worse person. There’s been a reason some flailing instinct in him had begged Donna to come with him, in that diner, years ago, when they were both cowards. He needed her, a part of him had known even then, to hold him back from the fall. She’d nearly killed herself in the process of stopping himself chasing ruin. They’d only just made it out. He knows that. He wears the scars and the memories and the criminal record every day. They nearly lost, very nearly lost everything. He is incredibly lucky. He knows it.

But he still misses it. 

He still misses the thrill of the snap, the moment his brain seizes on the answer. He misses pressing his mind into a problem and finding a solution. He misses the risk, the danger, misses finding ways to break walls down and bend people and situations to his will, even as he knows he’s romanticising those things. He’s forgotten or ignoring the fear, the regret, the guilt, the way he’d bolt awake at bed at night or fail to fall asleep in the first place. Instead, he misses the thrill of it all. 

Donna had read all that in him. She’d pressed her hand over his, asked him what he wanted to do. 

He’d said, I want to be a lawyer, and that had hurt them both when he’d said it and his voice had broken over it. 

I know, but you can’t, she’d said. And then she’d squeezed his hand in the hanging silence. 

Harvey is learning, there are consequences. 

He’d cried, then, over it all. She’d let him, held him. Loss is painful and it isn’t always just losing the good that hurts. Law had made him a worse man, and he still missed it. Wishing from the soul isn’t logical. He was learning that too. 

They’d talked about it, back and forth, for a couple of weeks. Sometimes, he thinks, fuck it, let’s just do it. It’s still high stakes, it’s still sports, there’s still the law. It’s something. Maybe he’ll love it and do it forever. Maybe he’ll hate it, and try something else. He’s got Donna, now. Nothing else is unsolvable as long as he wakes up every morning with the dusk of red hair tickling his eyelashes. 

Sometimes, he thinks about the fact he’ll never see the inside of a courtroom again, not from a councillors chair at least, and he thinks about how he’ll never put his name to a judgement, never sign off on a settlement again, and he knows that’s not all of who he is, but it’s not none of who he is, and he hasn’t changed that much yet. There’s gaps in him where the law used to be that are still empty because he hasn’t figured out what to fill them with yet. He can’t fill them all with Donna. She’s fierce and independent and deserves someone who’s with her because he wants to be and chooses to be and not because he doesn’t have anything else. He knows it’ll take time, and he knows it’ll come, he’ll keep changing, and all the cracks will close, and all the gaps will fill, but the space between feels like whispers, and it’s tough. He doesn’t know who he’s going to be at the end of it all, and he doesn’t know who he’s going to be in the meantime.

Sometimes he still feels like he’s just a place for ghosts. 

Whatever you want to do, Harvey, she’d said. I believe in you. I’m with you. Whatever happens. 

Ultimately, he goes with, fuck it, let’s do it. He says to Donna out loud, fuck it, let’s do it, with a shrug, and she smiles, sadness behind pride, cups his jaw, his now semi-permanent beard giving way under her fingerprints, and she says, you’re gonna be the best goddamn agent this city has ever seen.

When she says it, there’s no bravado, and no pressure, no expectation. She just believes in him, the same way she believes in the sun and in the way she trusts it will rise again every morning. 

He grows into his cracks, a little. 

-

He still gets to see Mike. Mike thinks Harvey’s new job is fantastic and finds excuses to tag along when Harvey meets with his growing roster of clients. He gets more excited as the names get more recognisable. 

When the names start sounding like ‘Curry’ and ‘Brady’, he thinks Mike might actually faint. 

They’re not partners, not anymore, but Mike becomes proficient in manipulating their diaries - Harvey suspects that’s mostly Donna - so that they need to get together to look over paperwork, or for Mike to ask Harvey’s advice on things he definitely knows. Harvey knows Mike remembers everything, so he hasn’t forgotten the minutiae of some esoteric detail on Title 18 when one of his clients is on the block for counterfeiting, but he calls Harvey anyway. Harvey humours him, though he knows he shouldn’t. Still, it’s nice to be wanted. It’s nice to sit in his old office with Mike, while Mike calls Harvey old and Harvey called Mike an idiot. 

They’re halfway through a round of trashball (the name Mike had enthusiastically given the idle throwing of balled up paper into the garbage can and which had stuck, somehow) when they are caught by Donna, who threatens to fire Mike. 

You can’t fire me, Mike says. 

Are you kidding, she can fire me and I don’t even work here, Harvey says. Donna catches his eye when he’d said it, quirks an eyebrow into her forehead, and Harvey smiles back so broadly that Mike says, Jesus guys, get a room. 

Jessica passes Harvey’s name on when they sign clients who play and requires him to come into the office to check over paperwork she would have just emailed to everyone else. She still asks after him, Donna had told him, any day he’s not due for a visit, and she starts to drop by for dinner. When she does, Harvey still can’t shake the vague feeling of being called on the carpet by the principal. There’s a part of Jessica, he knows, that will always restrict him.

Louis finds reasons to need meetings with Harvey to discuss the interests of the people they’re both representing, and pays for lunch while they eat steak and talk mostly about things other than work. Harvey’s different these days, but so is Louis. Despite all odds, leadership suits him. Bizarrely, it’s mellowed him out, made him steady, and there’s some deep vein of wisdom that’s been hiding in him that’s starting to show itself. 

Can you fucking believe it, Jessica says to Harvey, once, over drinks in her office when they’re celebrating both signing LeBron. 

I can fucking not, Harvey confirms, and lifts his glass and eyebrow towards her.

Louis, it turns out, is an excellent managing partner. Pearson Litt doesn’t quite trip off Harvey’s tongue the way Pearson Specter did, but then, the words Pearson Specter had been on his lips and heart for so long that it was still almost second nature, waiting for it. 

Pearson Litt fits better, Harvey decides. 

Rachel and Harvey still see each other, not just because her and Mike drop around for drinks, or meet them out for dinner. Rachel latched on to Harvey, years ago, when she was trying to pretend her father wasn’t an influence and she needed someone to gently prod her, on occasion, back on the right path. 

Harvey hadn’t known at the time that her semi-regular pilfering of his bagels out of his hand during lunch was less about hunger than about proximity.

You taught me a lot, she tells him once, as they walk down to the bodega to pick up another bottle of wine while Donna and Mike finish the roast dinner back at his and Donna’s. 

Harvey stuffs his hands in his pockets to hide the way his fingers twitched uncomfortably against his palms. Rachel is dangerously close to giving a speech, and Harvey does not like speeches.

She starts, you’re like a …

He smiles and says, you better not say father. 

Rachel pauses for thought and then declares him a wise uncle. Harvey negotiates her down to ‘fun older brother’. Then, she slips her hand up past his elbow, squeezes his arm, and gives a low, long-considered speech, tells him she’s proud of him, happy for him, that he and Donna are good together and good for each other, that she misses him in the office, that she was so grateful. 

For what, Harvey says, confused. 

For Mike, Rachel says. You brought him into my life, and then you went to prison so he could stay in it. 

I’ll never forget that, she says. 

Harvey coughs and ducks his chin into his chest when she says that. He still only cries in front of Donna. 

Life settles, and he finds that in among it all, cracks are filling, and so are all the gaps where law used to be. He’s surprised to find it’s filled less by work and more by people. He used to find corners, edges, for them, and now they’re pressing into the centre. 

It doesn’t take away all the hurt. It still stings when Louis mentions going to court, and when Mike jokes that finally Harvey knows what it’s like to be a fake lawyer as well. It still hurts when he helps work through client caseloads with Jessica, unofficially, and then they get to the signatories and he has to sit back instead of picking up his pen. 

He enjoys getting home at 7pm and not 11. He enjoys coming home to Donna, with enough time to cook and watch reruns and fall into bed while he still has the energy to slip his old Harvard shirt off her shoulders, his chest against her back, his hand between her legs. He enjoys that taking work home involves stats and advice and not stalking to apartments and houses in the early hours of the morning to strongarm and blackmail people. He even enjoys, a little, admitting he needs glasses so he can work at his desk, and not squint his way into clarity. He doesn’t like glasses so much as he likes that he’s not unconsciously trying to impress his secretary with misplaced ideas of masculinity and strength. 

He also likes that Donna turns out to have a bit of a thing for him with a beard and glasses. It becomes a habit for her to pass by his desk, in the evening, where she’s cooking and he’s tidying up the last of his paperwork, and to nudge his glasses up to his forehead so she can kiss his eyelids and tickle her fingers across the salt and pepper that’s starting to show in his beard. She tells him he looks old in a way that makes his heart swell. It knocks out the worst of the way he’ll suddenly remember, in the middle of paperwork, that the deadline he’s working to isn’t court or a ruling but that one of his guys is trying to get a couple of extra percentage points on his contract. It takes the edge off the phone calls where people ask if he’s still a lawyer, the quiet _oh_ that always follows his explanation, the way some people get awkward around him. There’s a couple of people that he’s known for a long time who look at him not like he’s Harvey but like he’s his conviction, and he never realised the sting of that, even through all the ways so many of his clients had tried to tell him. He’s free, but there’s a part of him that won’t ever be, because freedom, it turns out, isn’t the solution to guilt. 

He finally realises what bittersweet really is.

He still cries, sometimes, over it all, but mostly, he’s grateful. 

-

They’re out walking. 

He loves NYC, still. He always has and always will. They’ve talked about moving, about heading up to Boston to be with Harvey’s family, or Connecticut to be with Donna’s. They’d half-heartedly looked at a couple of brownstones, last time they’d been visiting Lily, but neither of them can muster the courage to step away from the city that brought them to each other. 

Donna resigns from the firm (Jessica says, Jesus Harvey, when are you going to stop ruining my staffing plans), and helps Harvey. Well, technically she helps, but really, she runs the agency they start, and she’s born for that kind of work. 

They travel, and explore, and there are cities they enjoy. They spend six months in London, once, helping one of Harvey’s clients get established. Then, they spend six months in Paris, because Donna’s always wanted to and he can’t think of anything else good enough to do for her. They rent a place near the canals, old enough that the ceilings aren’t quite level anymore, and Harvey softens his stomach on a solid diet of croissants and camembert and he doesn’t jog the canals quite enough to outrun all the carbs. 

He’s only just learned enough of the French language to not be sneered at like a tourist when New York beckons them back home to skyscrapers and skyline. He misses the croissants, settled back in Manhattan, but he loves that he can get a piece-of-shit hot dog on the street for a dollar again. Harvey’s always pretended he’s not nostalgic, even as he embraces bagels and dollar slices of pizza from hole in the walls at 1am. 

Harvey is, in fact, nostalgic - much more nostalgic than just about anyone knows, and so, strolling through Central Park on a slow autumn evening, ten years after he’d put prison walls behind him and Donna in front of him, As he crunches leaves underfoot and shrugs against the chill in the air, Harvey thinks back. 

He thinks back, to what feels like a hundred years and a whole other life ago, to when Donna had barged into a holding cell in the middle of New York City and had tried to take his place, tried to talk him out of throwing himself over a cliff for them all, tried to find him an escape hatch. If he imagines hard enough, he can still feel the ghost of handcuffs and the way they scraped at his skin and made everything feel real.

He remembers the way she’d kissed him, for the first time in years, in his office, solace and soul, remembers how he’d thought for a second at the time that maybe she was just trying to make him feel better, before she’d fallen into bed with him and they’d found each other in love, probably for years before, right in the middle of it all. 

He remembers some things like fog, mostly the big things - the sentence and dressing down he’d gotten from the judge, the screwdriver Gallo had rammed into his ribcage, the meeting with the warden where he’d finally gotten his release date. They’re all blurs, impressions, and he would have sworn he’d dreamed the whole thing up if it hadn’t been for all the months that he’d had to stare at cinderblock and blue denim. 

It’s Donna that’s in sharp relief. He remembers her visiting him, inside Danbury or in the hospital, red hair and freckles emerging from behind makeup that told him how sunny it had been in New York that week. He remembers every dress she wore to see him, remembers the specific way she’d press her thumb against his wrist in a way that told him everything was going to be okay and the way she smiled at him with a steadiness that made him relax. He remembers the way she’d tell him she loved him and that she believed in him - sometimes she said just that and sometimes she called him an idiot, which means the same. 

  
  


He remembers the food, he remembers the letters and the phone calls, he remembers getting jumped in the yard, he remembers the first time he bench pressed 250 and people started to give him a wide berth. 

He remembers getting out, and then just Donna, like a mirage, for weeks. He remembers one knee and he remembers _I do_ , and he remembers how long it took him to be able to look at his father’s ring on his left hand without feeling like he needed a moment to process everything. 

He remembers waking up and seeing her next to him, sink deeply into sleep and stretched across his pillows, and he remembers the moment he got used to that, and he remembers feeling so grateful he was able to get used to waking up next to her that it made it all new for another year or so. 

He remembers talking about kids with her, and how much that was, how big it felt. He remembers how different it made being with Donna, after that, the maybe of creation in the loving of her. 

Harvey knew into the core of his soul that if he could just have Donna, for the rest of his life, just themselves, and no one else filling their house, he would still be the most contented man who’s ever walked the earth. If the only family they ever had was each other - well, Donna is the whole world, and that was all he needed. And he remembers a not-small part of him that was utterly terrified at the mere prospect of being responsible for making-and-then-not-fucking-up a whole complete person. 

Making-and-then-not-fucking-up a person was also as exciting a thought as it was terrifying, and he remembers that he wasn’t on the fence as much as he was just standing out, waiting for the sun or the moon, and either would be genuinely beautiful.

And then, he remembers her, a few years later, after trips and selling his place, after six months in Paris, of picking out a bigger apartment, because they were going to need more bedrooms. 

There’s a straw-haired four year old tottering a few yards in front of them, his hair turning strawberry blonde when it catches the cooling sun the right way, and Harvey’s working hard on not fucking him up. Donna doesn’t have to try nearly as hard, and loves him as fiercely and as easily as she loves Harvey. She’s a natural mother, they found out. Harvey’s found new ways to love her, watching her love the tiny human they made. 

And he loves the way she still lets them be them. They’re Harvey and Donna, still. They’re not just parents. She still draws him out of the house for dates, for theatre, for Giants games (she hates the sport but loves the hot dogs and the foam fingers). She still surprises him in bed, still slips into the shower behind him to kiss up his spine and trace his hips with her fingers before spinning him around to push him back against the tile and slick her hands over his body. He’s getting softer with age, he’s not heavy but he’s drawn in watercolour now and not in stone, but she loves that about him even as she pokes his belly and asks him if he still knows where the gym is. 

Autumn is stretching out in front of them, another year, and as they tread the paths of Central Park, Harvey with one eye on the person they’re raising a few yards ahead, he feels Donna slip her hand through his, their rings knocking quietly, her wedding ring against the one she’d asked him to be hers with, and she leans her body against his arm to ward off the chill of the evening, and as the sun slips behind one of the skyscrapers framing the horizon beyond them, he thinks, 

  
  
  


he lost everything he ever worked for. 

He got everything he ever wanted. 

_The End._

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well. 
> 
> I had no idea when I posted the first chapter of what was, at the time, a one-shot, that it would turn into the 13 chapters it did. It's been fun, and hard, and I want to thank any and all of you who've taken the time to read or comment over the last few months. 
> 
> Special thanks to Aditi, who was endlessly encouraging and creative. And to Luisa, who patiently explained my own ideas to me when I was lost in the woods and floundering. This wouldn't have been finished without them. 
> 
> I did my best, and I hope I've done right by them.


End file.
